Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, *Language Shoes*, 2024. Running shoes, silk thread, blackberry ink, grass ink, Oregon grape ink, wildflower ink, aluminum, 5 × 4.5 × 11 inches (L) 4.5 × 4.5 × 10 inches (R).
Courtesy of Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill and Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo: Jessann Reece.

How would a spider wear pajamas? I’m so glad you asked: top two sets of limbs in parallel arm holes. At least, that’s the implication of Vancouver-based artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s The Spider Plays at Cooper Cole. Whether spiders might also employ a pair of four-legged pajama pants or whether they exist within the great canon of pants-less creatures (Winnie the Pooh, Donald Duck, etc.) is a question that still lingers in the air of the Toronto gallery. L’Hirondelle Hill only provides us with the outfit’s top half, a beautiful silk pajama shirt stained with blackberries called Parachute / I dream I am jumping, running, swimming, climbing.

*The Spider Plays*, 2024, installation view, Cooper Cole, Toronto.
Courtesy of Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill and Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo: Jessann Reece.

The titular work of L’Hirondelle Hill’s show, Spider Play itself, is a set of concrete poems-cum-theatrical scripts on pages that are, like the pajama shirt provided for its imagined cast of spiders, stained with berries among a host of other substances including, beguilingly, Crisco. Each of the seven pages of the two-act play features conventionally formatted scene descriptions and dialogue appearing in multiples of eight, sixteen, or, in one case, four lines to form the body of the script and, well, the body of the spider. So we’ve got a play, we’ve got a costume, and now, against the western wall of the space, a large wooden stage that I, as an audience member (or maybe a burgeoning actor), was encouraged to climb for a better vantage of the remaining ephemera of the performance. But I’m shilly-shallying now: both the I that was standing in Cooper Cole and the I that is writing this now are happy to continue lingering to avoid getting to the point. It’s time I return to the scene of my crime.

Now, okay—when I say “crime,” I just mean that I wrote a critical review. There’s a bit of unpleasant tension, even if only in your head, when you’ve been a little mean. Toronto is, oftentimes, the largest small town in the world, and I have had trouble accepting my choice to become this city’s designated spoilsport. It’s not lost on me how much has gone into every show I see, whether I like it or not. Knowing that this is the work of real people, many of whom I will manage to bump into, and that this is the center of both their labor and their passion, makes it harder every day to offer any value judgment at all.

Tishan Hsu, *ear-screen-skin with casts*, 2024. Installation view in *Interface Remix*, 2024, MOCA Toronto.
© 2024 Tishan Hsu Artists Rights Society/New York. Photo: LF Documentation.

The show up on the third floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Toronto is Interface Remix, a survey of work by New York–based multimedia artist Tishan Hsu. The show spans five decades of Hsu’s output and, incidentally, records the history of technological development since the 1980s. In the wake of this show, I should be able to say all sorts of things about technology, about my discomfort around currently emergent technologiesadopted by artistic communities (sorry, I remain an AI skeptic). Ostensibly, I should also have a lot to say about Hsu’s thematic relationship to skins, to surfaces and obscuration, as a prominent throughline in the work, but there is one thing I must get off my chest first: Tishan Hsu could set a hell of a boulder problem.

Ears-screen-skin with casts: Toronto (2024)—an exhibition-specific installation of printed vinyl and two large, blobby, acrylic handles placed one on top of the other with about a body and a half’s space between—testifies to the potential career pivot. The forms that appear on the vinyl skin, which create the illusion of additional bulging protrusions and depressions, might look at home in a climbing gym; they resemble large volumes, bulbous slopers, tiny pocket holds in which you could jam a finger or two. The interaction between body and technology is central to Hsu’s work, so it can’t really be so impropietous to want to get my body involved as well. The verdict? I could climb it.

It bears mentioning that in both writing and climbing I have many of the same weaknesses. I am inflexible. I have trouble committing to a big move, a fear of heights, and a bad grip. I have spent little time climbing seriously though I was, at one point in my life, a child and have scaled many things as a result. Perhaps, though, I’ve solved my problem. “Climbable” is not an objective metric but one dependent on my unquestionable subjectivity. Whether I can climb something is a matter of my own expertise and my own perception of a problem and ability to formulate a solution for it. To say whether a work is climbable is a kind of judgment but based in a metric so removed from how we’ve come to look at art's value. So there, ha! If ever there was a rubric I could apply unflinchingly, this might be it.

*WHO IS THIS SONG?,* 2024, installation view, Cooper Cole, Toronto.
Courtesy of Kate Newby and Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo: Jessann Reece.

If Hsu’s Interface Remix reminds me of a boulder gym, then Kate Newby’s WHO IS THIS SONG?, next door to L’Hirondelle Hill’s show in Cooper Cole’s main space, reminds me of Portable: a boulder problem usually located near the popular Superfly in Squamish, British Columbia, that has experienced a bit of niche virality as of late. Usually located? Well, it’s about a foot tall and, true to its name, can be picked up and dropped elsewhere. Conveniently, the works that populate Newby’s show look like rocks. The ceramic forms—some finished with a glossy glaze, some with the rock-like texture of a stage prop—lay in a grid accompanied by flattened clay forms and divoted stoneware with puddles of melted found glass in their centers. The most rock-like, closed forms are meant to be picked up and shook like rattles, activating the invisible pebbles inside the hollow forms.

Kate Newby, *Let me be the wind that pulls your hair*, 2017. Stoneware, 12 × 17 × 13 inches.
Courtesy of Kate Newby and Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo Jessann Reece.

Here is how Mountain Project, a massive, crowdsourced database of climbing routes, describes how one should approach Portable: “V4 if you mantle it. Pretty easy, like doing a dip if you have feet off and ‘campus’ it. . . . Make sure it's sitting level!”1 “Mantle,” here, means the sort of motion you would need to approach climbing a shelf: pulling up until you are able to transition into pushing down. To “campus” something is to use only your hands and not your feet. I imagine this would be the same approach one would take to climb Newby’s work, particularly one of the most stable looking pieces, Let me be the wind that pulls your hair (2017), a matte black form about 30 cm tall. Could I complete this climb, conceptually? Yes. In reality? Likely not.

Stephanie Comilang, *Bouquets for Paradise*, 2024, installation view, Daniel Faria.
Photo: LF Documentation.

Stephanie Comilang’s Bouquets for Paradise at Daniel Faria poses a different issue. Two large sculptures, of roughly human height and build, are draped in fluttering squares of fabric embroidered with, fittingly, monarch butterflies. I could more or less clamber up these sculptures but for the fact that I cannot have any confidence in whatever it is that the fabric is obscuring. Is there a rigorous scaffolding, in the shape of a body, that could support me? The wall-based work features jeans flayed and mounted on canvas, embroidered this time with the flowering parts of coffee trees, vanilla orchids, and other plants that have been central in extractive colonial agriculture. I initially thought that I wouldn’t be able to climb paintings and that the use of this metric would more or less eliminate any works on canvas from my life, but seeing the scale of Comilang’s work, I do not think it is outside of the realm of possibility to imagine grabbing hold of the lip of a stretched canvas and hoisting oneself up if the art handlers had secured it sufficiently.

Mamu Mifi: *Ginger Chimes*, 2024, installation view, Joys.
Courtesy of the artists and Joys. Photo: Alison Postma.

At the laneway gallery Joys, Ginger Chimes by Mamu Mifi (the collaborative practice by Jennifer Laflamme and Marisa Müsing) presents another case of Schrödinger's precarity. Chrysalis in Three (2024), for example, two conjoined carved wood forms intermittently draped and wrapped with translucent silk, would topple immediately at my current size. It would, however, be a great pleasure to climb if I were George Shrinks. Small silver embellishments embedded into neighboring works would make some decent handholds. The hand-dyed silk that is a throughline through the work would provide useful rope-like supports—with the exception of the silk enclosing the spalted wood carving at the center of Encased Lunar Bloom (2024), which very much acts like a highway rockfall net but on an insect scale.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill: *The Spider Plays*, 2024, installation view, Cooper Cole, Toronto.
Courtesy of Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill and Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo: Jessann Reece.

So now the question has changed: How would a spider wear climbing shoes? Perhaps with two pairs on the bottom four limbs or even eight in total. We could also consider that a spider might just wear a single pair, like us. L’Hirondelle Hill’s exhibition includes a pair of running shoes with aluminum lining the sole and covered in a silk thread replicating the hairs on spider feet, which helps them, among other things, stick to surfaces. What in her show is climbable? The stage, though I can achieve that by walking up the steps. I could hang off the four-armed coat hanger accompanying the afore-mentioned pajama shirt. If I were, myself, really a spider, I could climb everything, though I acknowledge this is a fantasy. I’ve invented a version of myself as a viewer who is small, or who has the body of the spider, to solve the problem of climbing these works in their context. It seems there is no way of getting around meeting a work halfway.

The rubric I presented—Can I climb this work?— is clear. But now I worry about the logical progression of that question: Should I climb it? Both Comilang’s work at Daniel Faria and Mamu Mifi’s at Joys expressly reference diasporic experiences in which I have no footing, and I further omitted writing about work in a show that was intimately tied to extremely vulnerable writings because it felt horrific to ignore that context. I’ve reinvented my problem: Now I’ll have to face a hoard of people after I’ve said the most pointless thing I could say about their work, and what's worse, I’ve used it to prove a point, barely considering it on its own terms. I’m not really so sure now that it would be worse that someone might know I disliked their show than to know whatever version of me is capable of that.

SISYPHUS HITS THE TOWN!

“The rubric I presented—Can I climb this work?— is clear. But now I worry about the logical progression of that question: Should I climb it?”

SISYPHUS HITS THE TOWN!

“The rubric I presented—Can I climb this work?— is clear. But now I worry about the logical progression of that question: Should I climb it?”

Through Frosted Glass