Both Liss Platt and Hannah Miami Jickling, in concurrent shows at YYZ,
are in some respects making art about art – and both seem to be doing
so in part to demonstrate their projects follow a through-line of
conceptualism, and are thus meaningful (post-meaningful?), after a
fashion. Or perhaps it's just a perfunctory academic gesture – a few
footnotes to cover their asses. Jickling, in a continuation of her
Temporary Autonomous Paradise Zone series, suggests her kooky request
to have viewers house a snowball is a nod to Andy Goldsworthy's work
with snowballs – and so it is, but that doesn't make it anything more
than vaguely amusing and interesting (just as amusing and interesting,
by the way, as the non-Goldsworthy-esque offer she makes to viewers to
wear one of the pairs of Bermuda shorts she's got on display). Platt
has a more concrete focus, candy, and her exhibit, primarily large
photographic prints of that stuff arranged in patterns, puts its
quotations around colour field painting and op-art. It's a decent idea:
candy as mass-produced meditation on notions of colour (candy is dyed,
kinda like a Helen Frankenthaler painting). But for Platt – based on
her statement, anyway – there's much more: the show, entitled
“Comfort,” is about guilt, gender, childhood and other cultural
associations we have with candy, as apparently mined in an interactive
web-based component. This seems unconvincing, and forced: in the case
of Platt, unlike in Jickling's, her allusive deed conveys enough;
indeed, that's all there is.