The Globe & Mail
December 30, 2006
GALLERY GOING
Zeroing in on some great big ideas
by Gary Michael Dault
Punch 3 at G+ Galleries
$800 - $2,500. Until Jan. 31.
50 Gladstone Ave. 416-840-5549.
This is another vividly interesting group show, curated by Holly Lee of G+ Galleries and Natalie Matutschovsky of The Walrus magazine. This one, the third of the Punch shows since 2002, is a vast and vital assemblage of the work of 10 young artists working with photography. A lot of it is pretty hot.
Among the highlights are the Portraits from her El Presidente series by Davida Nemeroff: head-and-shoulders studies of what appear to be - because of their witty and wicked employment of the cultural accessorizing that has come to identify them - certain infamous political leaders: Mao, Fidel and others. These larger-than-life figures are here played by smaller-than-life stand-ins who wouldn't remind us of Mao and their ilk if they hadn't been equipped by Nemeroff with the right mustaches, hairstyles and other cliches of adjacent meaning. Each character, by the way, sports a realistic-looking stuffed squirrel on each shoulder.
Miles Collyer's chromatically brilliant and sculpturally forceful series of TrackTops Masks - big, bright, head-and-shoulders self-portraits - show the artist wearing examples of what are apparently "over 300 balaclavas and 45 tracksuit tops" he has collected. You can't really tell who it is gazing back at you through those two slit-like balaclava holes; it's Collyer, but it could be any number of sports figures (of either sex) or, as Collyer points out in his gallery statement, even the distant echo of pop culture's superheroes. Whoever they are, these hotly coloured, winterized figures pack a lot of punch as presences.
I also liked Tim Salterelli's Lineographic Drawing for William Higinbotham and Arthur Granjean (Higinbotham being, as Salterelli's notes will tell you, the inventor of "tennis for two, the predecessor of Ping-Pong." Granjean is the inventor of what would be marketed as the Etch A Sketch. Salterelli's "drawing" (in an edition of six) seems to be of a length of ribbon-like magnetic tape which is made to spell out "What goes around goes around," which is more endless and delightfully tautological than the usual, circular "What goes around comes around."
Digital gallery mock-up