reflections | november 15 - december 15 2001

Sylvia Safdie at Peak Gallery
Globe and Mail | Gallery Going | December 08, 2001
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT

Sylvia Safdie at the Peak Gallery

For its inaugural exhibition in its new space and with its clever new name, the Peak Gallery (it used to be the Pekao Gallery) has mounted a stunning exhibition of new work by Montreal sculptor Sylvia Safdie.

I have been rather out of patience with Safdie over the past few years, having come to feel that her work

- which often employs piles of stones, mirrors anddelicately murky drawings on mylar - has traded in an essentially sentimental kind of free-floating poetics.

This exhibition has changed my mind. Perhaps it's partly the superb installation contrived for her work by gallery director Zack Pospieszynski, but I've never seen Safdie's work look so majestic.

Central to the exhibition is a superb video called Ben. Here, a wall sized projection shows the domelike head of a man, eyes cast down, brow furrowed, which, near the bottom of the screen, becomes confounded with the rippling surface of a lake. The furrowing, the rippling, somehow become one, the whole montage amplifying itself into a powerful meditation on any pondering of the unknowable. Nearby, set into the gallery wall, is a video screen the size of a postage stamp (how inventive and poetically right it was to make it tiny!), showing the head of a baby (Sam), also traversed by, lapped by waves.

The third event in this big darkened room is a beautiful work called Keren No. 4 from 1999. A stout copper cylinder a couple of feet in diameter, waisthigh, sits glowing in gloom. When you come up to it and look inside, there is an open book there, resting on the bottom. Well, so what, right? But if you move away again slightly, the book leaps after you, is heaved up, in reflection, onto the inner wall of the copper vessel where it floats like a hologram. How convincingly it seems to cry out in its silence, in its containment! Safdie has used this format before, notably in Keren No. 1 (1994), but with a stone scored over with runic marks instead of the book. But the stone, a mere trophy, has no eloquence in the cylinder. The book, by contrast, is a prisoner there. There is more to the exhibition - including some remarkable drawings of trees. But these works are enough.

$1,800-$15,000. Until Dec. 15,23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.

Video art goes serene
Toronto Star | December 2002
by Peter Goddard

Humungous talking heads loom from wide-screen TVs in store windows. Big Santa faces chortle everywhere. U.S. Vice-President Dick Che- ney does his virtual Big Brother act attending cabinet meetings in Washington via videoconferencing.

Doom-de-doom-doom. These days, you don't know where to look because someone really big might be looking back at you.

But at Peak Gallery, Sylvia Safdie invests such imagery of omnipotence with a sense of beneficence, wisdom, calm and peace in Ben, a video project that's part of her Rejections show ending Saturday.

Safdie is a Montreal painter sculptor who continues to be far better known in Quebec than here. Not that her work hasn't travelled this far into Anglo country before. Last year she was shown at the Paul Petro Gallery. In 1994, she had some drawings and sculpture at Hart House's Justina M. Bamicke Gallery. Four years before that, some of her drawings and paintings were at the Evelyn Aimis Galleries' two locations. And she's the subject of at least one documentary.

But the afternoon I walked through her work at the Peak Gallery's new basement digs at 23 Morrow Ave., I was alone except for director Zack Pospieszynski. The space itself - a long rectangular room where Ben is playing on a perpetual loop, a second, parallel gallery space and a third wing that faces north - feels calm, respectful and welcoming. It's certainly not another art sepulchre.

For Ben, Safdie has superimposed the images of an older, balding man over images of moving water. The head remains the central figure. But as it moves, ripples come in and out of focus against his vast forehead, now in pale green, now in sun-flecked pale white. Occasionally a bird takes off with a splash out of the water. Sometimes shadows of people appear against the enormous forehead. All these shadows look like thoughts come alive here. But that's not the point with Ben or with the rest of Reflections, a blah title that evokes little of the different mysteries evoked. Ben is framed, paced and looped perfectly.

The same can also be said of Keren No. 4.

Basically - and Safdie doesn't stray far from earthbom basics - Keren No. 4 is a big gleaming copper pot with an open book resting inside on the bottom. Stand the appropriate distance from the lip of the pot and only the book's reflection can be seen as the open pages hover in rich, polished coppery reflection.

Circle the pot and the book appears to open and close.
It's as satisfying to look at as a beach-side fire, and as varied. Keren No. 4 is about ritual, too, forever changing the position of the book and the copper space around it as the viewer circles.

The hung works, like Earth Notes, Series II No. 1, with earth mixed with oil on mylar, are pretty enough but not nearly as involving as Keren No. 4. Ben or Sam the second, tiny video projection of an infant with watery effects directly across the room from Ben. In Threshold No. 2, in the smaller of the parallel spaces, the trick of the illusion almost overwhelms the installation's tranquil grace.

Stare into the copper instead, or think along with Ben .

- Peter Goddard