Myfanwy MacLeod, Everything Seems Empty Without You, 2009 & Hex (I–VII), 2010. Exhibition view. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada. Photo by M-KOS
With a second edition entitled “Builders“, the Canadian Biennial staged in Ottawa’s National Gallery an exhibition that perhaps went against the grain of mega international extravaganzas, and the usually vast array of ensuing curatorial ideas and ideals. This Biennale voluntarily took a hermetic and back-to-basics approach to its program, to exclusively centre on contemporary Canadian artists selected from the Gallery’s recent acquisitions over the past two years.
Curator Jonathan Shaughnessy cites in his catalogue essay that “Artists are builders in a rudimentary sense. They combine creative ideas, materials and technology with the aim to shape an original way of seeing and interpreting the world”. In an attempt to further canonize Canadiana, Shaughnessy’s title took inspirations from Toronto’s Hockey Hall of Fame, where Builders herein point to former players that go on to become coaches, managers or executives. Just as the hockey Builders were this way inducted for their contribution to the development of the nation’s most popular sport, Shaughnessy concludes that “In art, builders and players often prove to be one and the same.”
Fresh from the vaults of the National Gallery of Canada, a string works from emerging artists such as Melanie Authier and David Ross Harper mingle with others like Marcel Dzama and Ron Terada as well as veteran figures like Lynne Cohen and Michael Snow. This cross-generational survey of the nation’s talents comprises over 100 individual pieces by 45 artists, to embrace a multitude of disciplinary practices from all geographical backgrounds. Builders constitutes such a wide-encompassing show, that it at times risks a flattening of issues and subject matters. On the other hand, the works are so respectably themed from personal narrative to urbanization, the environment, identity politics, utopia and so on, that these read as a thorough cross-examination of Canada’s cultural material.
Continue reading “Review: Builders, Canadian Biennial 2012 at National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa”