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Reviews

Christopher Dewdney Essay

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Lost Between The Edges. Globe and Mail. Saturday August 18 2007.

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Lost Between The Edges. Forward.com. August 29 2007.

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Brainiac's Bedside Table. Boston Globe. July 24 2007.

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Gutenburg Galaxy - Impulse Archeology. Canadian Art Magazine. 2005.

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The Way We Were by Gary Michael Dault. Gallery Going. Globe and Mail. Saturday December 24 2005.

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Impulse Revisited by Peter Goddard. The Toronto Star. Friday November 18 2005.

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Artforum International
November 2001 - print edition - page 140

"Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences"

curated by Guy Cogeval and Dominique Paini

[This exhibition] originated at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I've never seen a more synapse-popping art show than this, which imaginatively juxtaposed Hitchcock production stills, storyboards, props, film clips, movie posters, sound-track sequences and set re-creations with famous and not-so-famous instances of modern painting, sculpture, photography, and literature.

The show was arranged thematically with galleries organized by topics such as voyeurism, dreams, terrors, idols, anxiety, and fetishes. These topics inevitably overlapped one another, and thus the experience of proceeding through the exhibition was one of deja vu, or repetition with difference, for the viewer kept returning to the same place, figuratively speaking.

The final gallery of the exhibition was devoted to the birds. It included art by Braque, Ernst, and Magritte, as well as a large-scale 1997 photographic diptych, No, by Canadian artist Eldon Garnet. The left-hand panel offered an extreme close-up of a bird's razor-sharp beak, angled apart like a pair of scissors and slathered with blood. The second panel presented a nude female torso, its pubic hair shaved away to expose a slit of flesh that seemed at once a gash or wound caused by the adjacent beak but also, in its sharp parallel lines, a visual analog to the beak, thus rendering the implied meaning of the photograpg indeterminate: Is woman sexual victim or castrator, innocent recipient of male violence or cause of it? The question is perfectly Hitchcockian, posed in one form or another throughout his oeuvre-and throughout the exhibition.

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

David M. Lubin

artforum.com

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A very small piece of art that's sure to rattle viewers

Gary Michael Dault. Saturday, November 24, 2001. Print Edition, Page R10

Toronto's Fly Gallery is probably the smallest art gallery in the city and maybe in the entire country. For the Fly Gallery, a flyspeck on Toronto's gallery-enriched Queen Street West, is merely a single storefront window, with changing exhibitions therein.

Eldon Garnet's new show at the Lilliputian gallery consists of only one piece -- a small construction called Geographically Based. Garnet, a Toronto-based sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, writer, editor and teacher, is probably best known for his large-scale public sculptures, such as his mighty Monument to the Chinese Railroad Workers beside the CN Tower. Geographically Based could pretty much fit into an attache case.

But the piece, though small, is powerful. And mordantly funny. It consists of a cleanly designed and handsomely crafted aluminum box-like construction, which supports a small horizontal shaft of steel that bears, at its far end, the rattle from a real rattlesnake.

Here's what happens. Because Garnet has affixed a motion sensor to the upper rim of the Fly's window and connected it to his rattler machine, whenever anybody makes a move -- such as, say, sauntering past the window -- the rattle begins to vibrate frantically, just the way a rattlesnake might if you came abruptly upon its resting place.

If you stand still and stare at this now-agitated machine, it continues to thrash its rattler at you until it registers that you're no longer moving. Then it stops. The minute you move again, though, the menacing agitation begins again. If you continue to walk away, there is a point when, once you are out of range, the rattler stops. When you look back at it, the thing seems to have fallen asleep -- master, once again, of its own spatial domain.

All in all, Geographically Based is an almost literally off-putting sculpture. It dares you to approach it and, once you're there in its presence, demands that you keep still. Here is interaction with the viewer writ large -- no small achievement for such a tiny work.

Price on request. Until Nov. 30, 1172 Queen St. West, Toronto; 416-539-8576.

more articles on Eldon Garnet @ globe and mail.com click here.

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detail from Aliyah
© copyright 1996. Eldon Garnet

Moving Toward The Light

Oliver Girling. September 12, 1996 Print Edition

Has contemporary Canadian art really got so tedious that, at international art fairs, they're telling "boring Canadian" jokes? My short answer, based solely on two major museums visited in the last couple of weeks, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is yes.

The Canadian offerings on view at both institutions were, with a couple of exceptions, dreary in surface and color, ultra-conventional in form and discreet to the point of camouflage with their surroundings.

The larger reasons for this state of affairs can be speculated on; I won't do it here. Suffice it to say that there are almost no paintings in the two displays. The photo-text works are simple to the point of conceptual starvation, while the sculptures and installations often depict fragments of unseen, greater wholes, which gives them an air of dissatisfaction and incompletion.

(For the record, my own interest in this is as a painter, represented in the National's collection. If you're interested, I could off the top of my head name 10 artists who would transform the world's view of contemporary Canadian art overnight.)

I prefer photographs to "photo-based art," in spite of current wisdom that says un-digitized photos are like paintings made with the artist's fingers tied back.

Take, for example, Eldon Garnet's current show of large photo-prints mounted on aluminum. The show is called Aliyah, which in Hebrew means being called to the light; the return of diaspora Jews to Israel; the novice mounting the podium to read from the Torah; or, most literally, illumination snatched from obscurity.

The pictures are neither boring nor dumb. They're ambiguous in their readings, rich in both color and surface texture, and a study in chiaroscuro: the juxtaposition of lights and darks made most famous by Rembrandt. Let's say the word -- they're painterly!

detail from Aliyah
© copyright 1996. Eldon Garnet

In spite of the uplifting title, there's plenty of gloom here. Followers of the artist's photography will recognize the mood of the work from his previous show at Genereux-Grunwald. But my memory of that work is of a full-blown morbidity, leavened perhaps by some gallows humor, but on the whole bleak. At first gasp, this show feels to be in the same territory, but a closer look reveals the superficiality of this reading.

Human flesh still reads as a papery envelope: covered up with dirt, bruised, polypous, a poor and inadequate covering against the elements and their ultimate, inevitable encroachment on our autonomy.

In these photographs, though, it isn't the grave that beckons and threatens -- though that's a viewer's first impression of these shiny, dark and light squares with body parts hovering in the middles. It's work -- human toil and activity -- that generates sweat and grime. But the suggestion is that the bodies are creating the pictorial definitions, coming out of, rather than being embraced by, the peripheral blackness.

And if the humor was a whisper before, now it's out there, explicit, sometimes uncorked as light self-parody of the project as a whole. For example, a dog's snout is just recognizable where the viewer is used to finding a human body-part. A crazily upside-down woman's face, far from being the victim of some trauma, is probably getting her hair washed.

And a man's dirty elbow that first looks like barbecued meat is actually wrapped backwards on his own back, on which he's carrying another man.

In this last picture, the soiled white arm works as a light source that illuminates the black man on the white man's back. The need for a light source in the middle of the image dictates the picture's hierarchy, which for obvious reasons could have set up an uncomfortable reading of the photograph's intentions. Remarkably, I don't think that reading even suggests itself.

Instead, it's an evocative image of human cooperation, of two men "bonded" in a way that neither the New Age nor gay liberation has thought of, as far as I know. So how did Garnet (who's also a novelist and a public sculptor) come up with it? I don't know; maybe in moving toward the light.