Reviews of two Toronto shows: "The Old College Try" at Red Bull 381 Projects and "feelers" at Susan Hobbs

Two quick reviews that I wrote for Montreal-based esse magazine came out this week, online and in print. One was for "The Old College Try," a joint show by Jon Sasaki and emerging artist Jessica Vallentin (whose work, especially the project Smithissauga, is impressive), held at Red Bull 381 Projects this summer and curated by my friend Nicholas Brown.

Jon Sasaki, Obsolete Mascot (Nork), 2009. photo : courtesy of the artist and Red Bull 381 Projects

The other was the dazzling, three-artist show "feelers" at Susan Hobbs Gallery here in Toronto, featuring Sarah Massecar, Sandra Meigs and Arlene Shechet and curated by artist Jen Hutton. The full reviews are available through esse's website, but here's a brief excerpt:

Victoria-based Sarah Massecar’s detailed pen and gouache drawings further this meditation on the comical, almost tender, nature of tactile and subconscious experience. Her “Push” series (2009) is a study of push puppets—the hand-held, plastic toys whose limbs are contorted with the press of a spring-loaded button—executed using an “automatic drawing” technique where the artist’s eyes stay fixed on their subject rather than on the paper. Massecar’s abstracted sketches, akin to biological dissection studies, reveal the inner workings of these simple mechanisms by isolating their individual movements.

The intuitive approach to curating that Hutton adopts can be a dangerous one; viewing the results is only interesting so long as the person intuiting has intimate knowledge of the works and a fresh perspective on their interrelationships. Fortunately, Hutton has the acuity of vision to pull it off and “feelers,” much like the subconscious realm it investigates, allows subtle connections to emerge gradually the more time one spends with it.