OGRES, HALFLINGS, NIGHT ELVES ANd CHUCK NORRIS RUNS TO MAY 3. TUE-SAT
NOON-5PM. INTERACCESS, 9 OSSINGTON. 416-599-7206. WWW.INTERACCESS.org.
ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI RUNS TO MAY 3. TUE-SAT NOON-5PM. GALLERY TPW, 56
OSSINGTON. 416-645-1066. WWW.GALLERYTPW.CA.
Eddo Stern’s “Ogres, Halflings, Night Elves and Chuck Norris” at InterAccess is colourful, weird and utterly imaginative (don’t miss it). Across the road at Gallery TPW is a pair of Artur Zmijewski videos that leave a more lasting impression. Zmijewski is from Poland, and is best known for creating situations and documenting them; his art, which has dealt with amputees, nude soldiers and paraplegics, courts controversy in that arch, European enfant terrible way that can seem totally obnoxious. Of the works at TPW, Singing Lesson 2/Gesangsstunde 2, in which a bunch of hearing-impaired youth sing Bach, is (despite its implicit declarations of humanism) more in this vein. In the more recent Them/Sie, Zmijewski brings together four poltico-religious groups — Catholic ladies, nationalist youth, a Jewish students’ league and some leftist-socialist university activists — and asks them to make murals representing their stances. Then, he encourages each group to “add” to the other murals, and the results are pretty tense, and oddly funny, the adding quickly devolving into rash acts of slashing and burning. The outwardly harmless context of the event — where everyone’s symbologies are reduced to, and indeed revealed as, child’s play — seems to cow the participants.