“Persona Volare: EXPO”

Toronto-based exhibiting collective Persona Volare is more a confederacy than a collaborative. It consists of artists of differing ambition, achievement and visibility. Until now their unity has mildly and pragmatically served to circumvent institutional control of the exhibition. However, the works brought to show were individual efforts with more or (often) less acknowledgement of the site, resulting in social exploits vague to outsiders, to which the art seemed incidental. Curator Stuart Reid’s invitation (in what turned out to be his valedictory project with the Tom Thomson Art Gallery) was open ended and generally yielding. Yet it was evident that the gallery’s institutional elements supplied a beneficial armature to the Persona Volare premise.

For two years, the artists had access to the gallery’s collection. Each selected a work or works to catalyze his or her contribution. In a stroke, “EXPO” gained more interplay with place than any preceding Persona Volare exhibition. Some of the choices were historical, others very recent; some iconic, others eccentric or obscure; some set in juxtaposition, others integrated into the ephemeral creations of the selector. The installation flowed rhythmically and, moreover, demarcated the configuration and characteristics of the galleries. The Tom Thomson plan splays out from an entry space dedicated to its historical works, anchored by paintings by, and artefacts related to, namesake artist and native son Tom Thomson, as well as examples of his inheritors, the Group of Seven. “EXPO” occupied two spacious side galleries, with one resonant incursion into the central sanctuary.

John Dickson devised a tableau, Looking for Tom Thomson—part reliquary, part diorama—within which a tiny camera shuttled back and forth aboard a long lathe screw (that also cranked a music box mechanism), transmitting a video signal to a TV placed in the adjacent historical art space. Its constant low-angle, low-resolution scanning transmogrified an assortment of Thomson bric-a-brac (his baby cup, palette, a cutting of old boards labelled “original / flooring and nails / from the / Tom Thomson house,” a 1910 photograph of the artist at Lake Scugog that foreshadowed photos of Robert Smithson at Great Salt Lake) into a gloomily familiar vista of the Algonquin in decline.

In the other gallery, Michael Davey’s sculptures also included Thomson curios, one an archaic fishing reel, the other a photo of the artist’s tent. These were incorporated into Davey’s irreverent magpie aesthetic with minimal illustrative fuss, neutralizing the didactic impulse that galleries too often press upon visitors. Alone among the group, he declined offering a superfluous explanation of his work for the wall label.

Various artistic observations were compelling and refreshing in their own ways, especially the consistently sensitive pairings with art from the collection: Johannes Zits with John Boyle, Lorna Mills with Lorne Wagman, Kate Wilson with Horace Vick—each a painter who had lived in the region—revealing the salient qualities of the muse at work as no verbal testimony could. Zits especially caught the fretful portrayal of male virility in Boyle’s 1982 canvas Face Off at Devil’s Elbow, whose three lacrosse players compete beneath three Avro Arrow interceptors against a psychedelic, rolling countryside.

Eleven carved baseball bats by Brian Hobbs, titled Decorative Riot Sticks, brought out to best effect the overlaid, seemingly imprinted, patterned aspects of Monica Tap’s large canvas Momento, 2002. Hobbs is an extended-practice printmaker. The bats could be used to make rolling woodcuts. Contrasting them with Tap’s painting emphasised their materiality. Visitors could lift any one from its bracket, admire and even caress its hard-grained texture, then take a few swings.

Chantal Rousseau, Rebecca Diederichs and Lisa Neighbour each conferred unintended narrative complexities on their chosen works, respectively a Cornelius Krieghoff painting of Indians examining kill at the end of a hunt, J W Beatty’s near life-size standing figure, Loraine, 1931, and in Neighbour’s case, a row of 16 landscape paintings, prints and photographs (by such artists as Thomson, Lawren Harris, David Milne, William Kurelek and David Bierk) hung adjacently so they created a continuous horizon line. Rousseau reversed hunter and hunted in her series of 12 ink drawings and an animated video depicting North American birds and mammals of prey gathered around human corpses, taken from the CSI television series. Diederichs ambiguously suggested detective work, too, in an investigatory grid of photographic details.

Lyla Rye’s T.V. for Teevee, an animated video loop of a playground climbing dome, was viewed most advantageously as a faint reflection in the framed glass of Cape Dorset artist Jamasie Teevee’s 1980 print, Camp Scene, whose black-blocked igloos with red and yellow accents its colour scheme and echoes its structure. Otherwise the video was tucked into an awkward corner niche that appeared like an unfortunately located emergency egress but was in fact Rye’s built intervention. On the same wall, resplendently commanding its territory, Carlo Cesta’s Compliment, simply a wide-slatted, translucent orange vertical blind, was pure architectural implication. It engaged in an autonomous dialectic alongside a small Guido Molinari canvas, Quantificateur Bleu #21, 1991, whose slightly akimbo, subtly contrasted ultramarine bands uncharacteristically appeared aroused into motion as if by a spatial disturbance, such as a breeze.

Mills and Wilson unfortunately upstaged their own works with misjudged juxtapositions. Mills flanked her black-and-white television embankment with redundantly similar canvases by Wagman (both self-portraits with fantasized leonine companions set in the familiar, nearby, Grey County Highlands). Each TV looped a different GIF animation clip, some poor animal (or alien) bizarrely substituted into a mundane human activity. Their appropriately aggregate overkill was misplaced, however, from the videos to the paintings. Wilson miscalculated in exactly the inverse ratio. She spread two separate quartets (odd back-road drawings and quirky recuperated snapshots), wishing to pull too many references out of Vick’s concisely peculiar, beautiful landscape.

The artists bestowed a fitting emblem on “EXPO”: a memory sketch of the geodesic maple leaf logo from Canada’s centennial. For most of Persona Volare’s 11 members (and curator Reid), 1967 would have been a lifelong generational marker. Moreover, it was the year that the Tom Thomson Art Gallery opened as a civic centennial showpiece. The logotype’s triangular sections were apparently dislodged during the intervening years, and the Cartesian snap jostled into fragmentary planes. The Persona Volare rendering could have been executed by the children these artists were when they first latched eyes on it, its mosaic Canadian-ness still cherished and intact. ❚

“Persona Volare: EXPO,” curated by Stuart Reid, was exhibited at Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, Ontario, from May 1 to June 21, 2009.

Ben Portis is a curator and critic living in Toronto.