Mark Strowbridge

Marcia Pitch’s Beyond the Playroom mixes the sinister and the cute

DETAILS

Welcome to the Dollhouse - works by Luba Diduch, David Khang, P. Roch Smith & Meichen Waxer
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Friday, August 7 - Tuesday, September 29

More in: Visual Arts

The four-artist exhibit “Welcome to the Dollhouse” mixes several media into a widely divergent and imaginative series of expressions on the idea of the miniature. Each artist is afforded a small room in an unadorned plywood dollhouse that is free of furnishings, windows and internal doors. The dollhouse here is a shell, which each artist must inhabit and make his or her own.

David Khang's sculpture and video work “Oral Fixations” initially attracts the viewer's eye with the scale of his art. The work is a series of miniature teeth and Khang’s ability to render such detail in such small form makes “Oral Fixations” impressive.

Below Khang are P. Roch Smith's male nude bronze sculptures. Like Khang’s work, they are impressive in their miniature craftsmanship. Whether personally inspired or simply observational, Smith's commentary on the nature of labour and the burdens of public and private expectations is clear and accessible, symbolized by the oversized tools wielded by the small bronze figures. These two contributions have a maturity and focus that are admirable.

To the left of Smith is the forgettable “Room for Imagination” by Luba Diduch. Ostensibly about the randomness of imagination, it is a 10-second blurred looping of a purplish-blue garden. There is little here to interest the mind or the eye. Simplicity can quite often convey complexity, but in this case it falls short.

Meichen Waxer's “Fake Mourning” comes closer to this idea. Her nicked, well-worn lockets stuffed with fake hair make for an emotional experience. She deliberately uses an object loaded with sentimentality and history to explore the nature of memory.

Domestic Mobility

Runs through September

Stride Gallery Plus-15 window

Politics and art have had a long entwined history. The difficulty in doing it well is balancing a sophisticated political critique with accessible and engaging art. Jasmine Valentina's “Domestic Mobility” is about community and looks to interact with the public. It is primarily a performance piece, which saw the artist dragging around a model house while dressed in her version of a stereotypical 1950s housewife to protest the destructively masculine culture of this city's approach to development. It is enthusiastic in its politics, but ultimately falls short as good political art.

In the exhibit space sits the house, made of cardboard and canvas, complete with nails and tape sticking out from the edges and roof. It's not terribly impressive as a work of art. It's more shack than house, which is unfortunate, because even political protest art should be well-made. This is not. In the accompanying video, presented on a much-too-small screen, we witness Valentina’s forays dragging the house around downtown Calgary. The canvas walls flap about and the whole house seems to shift and pitch like a ship on rough seas as it moves. It doesn’t exactly evoke the image of a strong protest. The house should have been made of heartier stuff. The colours, furthermore, are dull and the design too simple. It only has presence through its size, not its esthetic allure.

The exhibit, in the end, is more a record of her struggle to pull the house through the streets as a “feminine virus” in protest of masculine destructiveness than a consciousness-raising exercise. She shunts the interviews her political act was meant to gather off to YouTube, rather than include them anywhere here. Why could these ideas not have been integrated into the exhibit? This absence is the greatest flaw of the work: The viewer might find the results of those interviews — people's actual experiences and opinions — more enlightening and positive than Valentina's sophomoric analysis of gender politics.

Beyond the Playroom

Runs until August 30

The New Gallery Plus-15 window

Marcia Pitch's exhibit contains five groups of plush toys adorning the white walls of the glass enclosure, pinned like a butterfly collector's specimens or a hunter's trophies. These are not regular toys. There is something sinister behind their cuteness, but not in a homicidal Chucky kind of way.

Rather, there is an austerity that surrounds this exhibit — a meditation on a troubling point. The way these toys are arranged — crowded and staring straight out of the window — suggests something beyond the immediate childish association of the toys, something reminiscent of the daily lives of adults.

The joy of this exhibit is in the details. Many of the toys have unfinished seams — a pleasant feature. The viewer can empathize with these creations, as everyone emerges from childhood a little rough for wear and a frazzled at the seams.

It is the rabbits, with a carrot dangling in front of them, that are the most attractive. Most people will relate to and be immediately drawn to this part of the exhibit. The carrot on a stick is such a widely understood idiom that the viewer instantly recognizes and empathizes with it: a kind of perpetual longing for something just beyond a person's reach. This understanding establishes a sense of unity about the whole project. It's a subtle and confident stroke that makes this simple, yet curiously fascinating, menagerie of weirdness a pleasure to observe.