Undomesticated at Koffler Gallery
by :
Margaryta Golovchenko
Gwenaël Bélanger, Breakdown, 2008–13. Photo credit: © Sébastien Lapointe
For the twenty-four artists included in the exhibition Undomesticated at Toronto’s Koffler Gallery, Dorothy’s iconic line in The Wizard of Oz—“there’s no place like home”—offers an invitation to consider all the ways one might perceive a home and the many forms it can take. The exhibition itself embraces this sense of the multitudinous in its installation, which spills out of the familiar space of the gallery to occupy the three floors and two staircases of the building. Undomesticated reaffirms the strangeness in everyday life by defamiliarizing domestic objects like furniture and place settings, things many of us have come to view as the stable and permanent building blocks that make our daily routines possible.
This strategy of defamiliarizing begins as soon as visitors walk in and encounter Gwenaël Bélanger’s Breakdown (2008–13), a short, surreal animated video of a house disintegrating as it falls from the sky. Details like how planks of wood and toilets might be ripped out of their intended context as functional objects and lost to the forces of nature are carefully researched, making Bélanger’s video as a whole look physically plausible. This is a stark contrast to Bélanger’s other work in the show, a photograph called Le Grand Fatras (The Big Jumble, 2005), which depicts domestic objects suspended in the air the moment before they hit the ground. Bélanger’s work introduces a theme further explored by the rest of the artists in the exhibition: the discomfort that arises from seeing familiar spaces and objects literally destroyed, a sensation conditioned by contemporary society’s preoccupation with monetary- and use-value as a way of legitimizing an object’s existence.
The artworks in the gallery space are presented without didactics and are contained inside a makeshift home created by artist Nicolas Fleming out of repurposed drywall and plaster. The surrealist quality of finding a home within a gallery space is also manifested in works like Yannick Pouliot’s Se suffire à soi-même (2001). This bloated and unusable Victorian sofa upsets our conventional perception of the home as a safe space in which objects like a couch are meant to cater to our needs rather than hinder them. Also disturbed are our expectations of a neat delineation between inside (culture) and outside (nature). For example, Mary Anne Barkhouse’s Service (2019), a table with place settings containing small creatures cast in glass and crystal with a fox sitting next to it, feels like the outside breaking into and even reclaiming the home, reminding us of how much we owe the natural world for all we have taken from it by force.
Lewis Kaye’s six-channel audio installation Elevations (2019) is a fitting transition between the exhibition in the gallery and artwork displayed in the adjacent staircases and hallways. Elevations is based on the sound of an old elevator in Kaye’s building, and the noises of the doors opening and closing and the familiar “ding” that occurs upon arrival are intermixed with sounds of the domestic space, like water dripping, on a five-minute loop. Playing with ideas of spatial transposition, Kaye draws attention to the way in which space exists as not only a physical entity but also a set of rules that are formed as we create space. As a result, things like the arrival of the elevator feel uncanny and strange when they occur out of context, when they violate these rules.
This interest in examining the relationship between the domestic objects and how they shape our notion of home in relation to personal and cultural identity extends to the rest of the Koffler Gallery’s spaces. Shellie Zhang’s photographs of purses made of Chinese pink brocade silk set against similarly pink, flower-print backdrops (Pink Handbag #1 and #2 (2017)), for example, draw attention to the commercialization of Chinese motifs for the Western market. The patterns on many of the brocades are explicitly tied to notions of femininity in Chinese culture, which raises issues of gender expanded on elsewhere by Shaheer Zazai’s prints of traditional Afghan rug patterns created from slashes and highlighted text in Microsoft Word.
Undomesticated makes visitors stop and consider the little things, the objects and routines that we often take for granted. Decontextualizing many of these objects and generally making the domestic space strange reveals their uncanny nature, turning them unfamiliar and even hostile. The artists featured in this exhibition push us to reconsider our own personal relationships with objects and the ways in which we imbue them with meaning and memory.
Undomesticated, 2019. Koffler Gallery installation photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Shellie Zhang, Undomesticated, 2019. Koffler Gallery. Installation photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. She is currently completing an MA in art history and curatorial studies at York University.
Koffler Gallery at Koffler Centre for the Arts
Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw St., Suite 104-105, Toronto, ON
