There has already been a considerable degree of media attention given to street artists Dan Bergeron and Gabriel Reese’s, a.k.a. fauxreel and Specter’s, “A City Renewal Project,” and for good reason: it’s damn cool. It seems, also, to have come at a perfect time. Bergeron has an installation at the newly reopened AGO — this year’s (other?) not-to-be-missed art event and to which “A City Renewal Project” acts as both a counterpoint and complement. Also, quirkily, the project opened the same weekend as Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, a movie about a playwright-director who recreates Manhattan in a soundstage — a large-scale echo of this warehouse-situated installation, in which an imagined, derelict Toronto block comes to life, complete with actual pipes, tiling, public phones, graffiti and, the pièce de résistance, a bus stop and shelter.
Bergeron and Reese’s objective is not verisimilitude, however, but collage and amalgamation. Their block is a composite of businesses, which have been given pseudonyms and come from all over the GTA, from Roncesvalles to Scarborough (you can see photographs of the originals at Red Bull 381 Projects). There’s little nostalgia or straightforward critique on gentrification. There is indeed a condo billboard on this block, suggesting its grim future, but the billboard’s semiotics are no less grim than what already exists around it.
Here, Bergeron and Reese have indulged in crass, totally un-PC joking that will no doubt offend some — Dude, Where’s My Dog? becomes the name of a Chinese restaurant, The Lawnfather the name of a landscaping company — but which is an integral part of the punny, vernacular play that defines their respective practices. In fact, “A City Renewal Project” is, through no small effort, an interior, amped-up version of Bergeron and Reese’s habitual canvas, whose shabby details have been decontextualized into something to which almost any viewer-citizen can lend a sly, smiling appraisal.