RUNS
TO OCT 13. MON-THU 10AM-5:30PM; FRI 10AM-9:30PM; SAT-SUN 10AM-5PM.
$15-$22. ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM, 100 QUEEN’S PARK. 416-586-8000.
WWW.ROM.ON.CA.
The finalists for the Sobey Art Award, a selection of whose work is now on display at the ROM (the winner will be announced Oct. 1), might be divided into two categories, conceptual and figurative — except that the figurative work is rich in concept, and the conceptual work all contains figures. (The figurative work, furthermore, is not strictly representational, which is to say it is more interested in conveying ideas than in studying reality, per se.)
There are indeed lines to be drawn, however: between the handmade and the manufactured, the concerted and the gesturally aloof (or sloppy, or coy). Since this is a contemporary art prize, there is a lot of the latter: Terence Koh, the jury’s pick for Ontario, provides a grand but meaningless piece (as is his wont); Tim Lee, the pick for West Coast/Yukon, is all about dry, dippy, post-structuralist games. Raphaëlle de Groot and Mario Doucette —representatives for Quebec and Atlantic Canada respectively, whose work is virtually unknown in these parts — do a bit better. De Groot’s videos, for which, among other things, she tapes paper to her head, are funnier than Lee’s, engaging with self-representation in a more grippingly primitive way.
One might compare Doucette, who does faux-naïf murals of colonialist massacres, to Daniel Barrow (the Prairies/North contender) though just because they draw doesn’t make them akin. The self-indulgence of Barrow’s work is actually a lot more like Koh’s, though its haunting, symbol-laden narratives, as well as its technical intricacy, are undoubtedly (and glaringly) without peer here.