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.

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