In Memory

Laurel Woodcock: Woodcock, who died last month at 56, was a fixture on the Toronto art scene for years, known for her wryly ambiguous and ultimately incisive works, most often using text, that left just enough space for the viewer to get lost in their own reading of a piece that could go in several directions at once.

Woodcock, a professor at the University of Guelph, set a hook — “on a clear day,” laser-cut into blue steel and borrowed from popular music, feels naggingly familiar and weirdly alien all at once — and left you to wriggle in the satisfying confusion that could result. Language — its power, its ambiguities and its frustrations — were her turf and she mined it with a gentle wit.

It’s hard to choose just one work — a little neon cloud, cartoon-like, floating on a gallery wall, its ambitions made futile by being tethered to the ground by its cord; bright-orange quotation marks, floating in space, calling into question all around them — but, for me, I suppose it would be Skyline. Written in friendly cursive, in cool neon-blue, it was at once word, hope, ambition and thing: a tight light encapsulation for dreaming, unrequited and not.

  • A memorial celebration for Laurel Woodcock will be held at the Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St. W. on Sunday, Feb. 5 at 6:30 p.m.

Ongoing

Chloe Wise, horrible sound as well: Wise, a 26-year old dynamo — from here, she’s now based in New York, to increasing acclaim — embraces the gleefully abject, infusing her hectic exhibitions — a display of painting, drawing, sculpture, video and installation — with objects made from the apparently edible. One recent work, a six-pointed Jewish icon made entirely from charred bacon, was called Star of Larry David: Very Badly Burnt; another, Louis Vuitton Baguette, was a tiny handbag, complete with gold chain, made from a chunk of bread.

Her new show here continues and extends the motif, as raw-wood pergolas serve as ersatz backdrop for her menu of off-the-rack Italian favourites — a lasagna left oozing on a two-by-four, spaghetti and meatballs cradled in an arch of wood. The not-so-subtle suggestion, of excess, commodity and cliché — easily packaged and exportable “Italian” food has stood in for the real thing for decades — makes her point clear: Authenticity is less elusive in the big, bad world of consumer culture as it is non-existent.

  • At Division Gallery, 45 Ernest Ave., until March 4.

Georgia Dickie, How Many Antennae: The clever, intuitive, wildly charming kit-bashing practice of Toronto-based Georgia Dickie has made her something of a fan favourite over the span of her young career and her new show reminds you why.

Dickie’s work bridges the grand gesture with the eccentric detail with seamless aplomb. A large structure cobbled together of found wood, metal and plaster spans the gallery with a helter-skelter, seductive roughness. But look closely and you’ll see the oddest things: a tiny dollhouse staircase, a mysterious photo of a backyard sculpture garden, the brass casing of a shotgun shell.

Scaling both up and down, Dickie tunes the viewer in to the creative reuse of all kinds of things, and reminds you that things are not what they seem and that objects, like people, live many lives — plenty of which we’ll never know.

  • At Cooper Cole, 1134 Dupont St., until March 11.

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