Sylvia Matas

Sylvia Matas is gone with the wind. For her first Toronto solo, “Red Shift,” the London-based Winnipeg artist showcases seven sculptures that find inspiration in unlikely places—like weather reports.

Matas is a recent Chelsea College of Art and Design grad capable of flipping the ordinary into extraordinary without going overboard or being completely swept away, unlike Mary Poppins. In the past, she has sorted and stacked coloured bits of confetti, torn phone books in half, piled miniscule and wormlike eraser shavings into pointy mountains, and made faux puddles from tear-shaped drops of ceramic. But instead of building new objects, here she collects and recycles into clever oblivion the stuff of kitchen drawers and tool sheds. Like in Wind, 2008, where 176 weather reports are snipped from the newspaper and clipped of their sentences to read nothing more than wispy phrases we’d find in Harlequin novels or ads for Maxi pads. “Breezy,” reads one. “Brisk south-westerly winds,” says another. Pinned to the walls like Dadaist ransom notes, the daily forecast, she suggests, is literature in its own right, even if improvisational and less than breaking news beside hyperbolic headlines, photos of burning buildings and bursting volcanoes on A1.

It calls to mind the work of Vancouver artist Germaine Koh who, since 1995, has been planting excerpts from her journal in the classified section of such Canadian newspapers as the Winnipeg Free Press, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. But while Koh has crafted her own prose, Matas leaves it up to the weather reporters, who sometimes have their head in the clouds. Two in a row read: “A windy day once more.” The stormy weather continues in Crater, 2008, a thick pile of sandpaper with circles cut out in each sheet forming a cyclone at the bottom. Other pieces drench us—and could require umbrellas. In Chain, 2005, 15 drooping rows of tinfoil call to mind watching rain drip from a windowsill, and Rope, 2005, braids together a finger-thick rope made from green dental floss (which oddly doesn’t smell minty). Consisting of nine boxes of floss, 200 strands thick, it could technically still be post-dinner cleaner, giving a Colgate smile to Godzilla.

A sort of sanitary minimalist and devout recycler, Matas could be our very own Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist who once turned a stack of wooden doors into a gargantuan wall for Documenta 12. (Once it collapsed under high winds, however, it looked more like a deflated windmill). She is spartan like Thomas Hirschhorn, the Swiss artist who is fond of plastic wrap and cardboard and has been known to call wastefulness a weapon. While this show culls together her quiet side, it leaves out the fun stuff. Matas, a spunky artist in her late 20s, has come a long way from her gentle and fairy tale-ish quaint watercolours on paper, the stuff of forests, rainbows and teetering brick castles from 2005, which suggests she is not always as stark as she is shown here.

But maybe pointing her compass in a new direction is what keeps her going. The next step for Matas may be to test drive bigger pieces and perhaps take a step outside and give public art a go. She might as well get some fresh air while she’s out there. And besides, she could always test out the weather. The wind will surely be with her. ❚

“Red Shift” was exhibited at Mercer Union in Toronto from March 6 to April 18, 2009.

Nadja Sayej is a Toronto-based journalist.