In the Corner of My Eye

In the Corner of My Eye The Drake Hotel (1150 Queen St W), (until June 25th.)

The thing to keep in mind about art shows at The Drake is that the patrons of the hotel are the primary intended audience, and they aren’t expected to tour the facilities with a brochure and notebook in hand. Instead, they’re supposed be surprised by artworks as they go about their business: in a stairwell, behind the counter, above a bank of seats in the café. The Drake, it is implied, is bursting with culture, positively seething. You never know where you might find it.

Unfortunately, this also means that, if you’re coming in off the street for the express purpose of seeing the art, it’s kinda hard to figure out where it is. For instance, the installation in the atrium window by Brendan George Ko is certainly art, but it’s not part of In the Corner of My Eye, the Drake’s main CONTACT festival exhibit. Inside the doors and all along the wall behind the main counter you can find works that are part of In the Corner of My Eye by Nadia Belerique (whose excellent MFA show is also on right now at Daniel Faria Gallery).

Her pieces include a mix of still life and abstract photographs presented in deliberately off-kilter ways: one is framed and mounted on a free-standing piece of drywall, others are mounted behind or outside of their frames, and a couple pieces (one of which isn’t a photo at all, but a sheet of white plastic mesh) are simply tacked to the wall. The unconventional hanging blurs the line between display and décor; given that one of the photos is of a lamp, I began to wonder whether the wall’s light fixtures were part of the installation or not.

While I was pondering this question, I was mercifully approached by The Drake’s on-site curator, Mia Nielsen, who was kind enough to guide me around. The show, she explained, is organized around the idea that our exposure to digitally-manipulated images and the ease of altering and recontextualizing pictures online has loosened our expectations of photography’s connection to reality. Thus, the artists in the show all use photographs in painterly or sculptural ways, playing with photographs as objects as well as images.

The work of Brooklyn-based artist Letha Wilson has been a very visible example of this tendency in recent years, and she’s represented in The Drake’s stairwell by Sunset Airplane Wilderness Ranch, a large c-print of a sunset that was folded into a paper airplane and then unfolded, leaving all the creases visible. Less obviously an artwork, the back of the main entryway is wallpapered with a work from Toronto artist Jeremy Jansen’s Burns series, in which he takes black-and-white film leader, wraps it in objects (plastic mesh, in this case), burns it, and then develops the image, resulting in a murky exposure that looks like an abstracted version of a Xeroxed punk-show flyer.

In the bar, you can find collage works by Matthew Craven, another Brooklynite, who combines black-and-white photos of antiquities, clipped from vintage textbooks, with abstract patterns in day-glo colours. Over in the café, Chilean artist Maria Aparicio Puentes performs a similar feat, embellishing black-and-white photographs of gamine youngsters with embroidery thread, forming patterns of rays that evoke prismatic light. All of these works are stylish and thought- provoking, so it’s a bit of a shame that they’re not presented in a context that gives them more room to breathe.

It’s still worth seeing them while they’re here, though, so if you visit the Drake, my advice is to find Mia Nielsen and ask for a tour. To her credit and The Drake’s, she’s on-site and available to talk to the public pretty much full-time.

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