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Ping Qiu at Peak Gallery
Showing at Peak with Kathy Dain is Ping Qiu, a Chinese artist currently
working in Berlin. Ping Qiu's exhibition is a very cunning one. Her fundamental
image -- the emblem upon which she builds her whole exhibition -- is the
hand.
But not just the hand per se. Ping Qiu employs the hand -- usually her
own hand -- as a model or template for an inventive number of creatures
and configurations.
When she casts both of her hands in bronze, for example (as she does in
three of her pieces for the current exhibition) and makes a "double
hand" by joining the two of them at a single wrist, the resulting
fanning-out of all 10 fingers then begins to look like a crab, a spider,
a fluttering bird -- images she employs in myriad ways in her work.
In a performance piece the artist enacted at her opening, she made a number
of castings of her hands in chocolate, for example, and then proceeded
(ouch!) to cut off the fingers with a butcher knife and offer them to
the crowd -- an act that was in equal measure darkly funny and savagely
evocative of acts of political and/or religious punishment.
She uses rubber gloves as an extrapolation of the hand and uses them,
moreover, with remarkable lyricism. In one photo-work, you see a serene
pond with gatherings of yellow rubber gloves masquerading as lotus blossoms
floating on its surface. In another, a cluster of pink lotus-blossom rubber
gloves floats languidly down a Venetian canal. Sometimes her rubber gloves
turn sinister and coruscating, as when she strings together spider webs
of cord and affixes rubber-glove spiders at their centres.
In a catalogue published in Berlin, there is even a photo of Ping Qiu
dressed in a red rubber-glove dress, the rubber-glove "hands"
clinging to her shoulders as straps and almost surreptitiously caressing
her breasts and tummy. After Ping Qiu, it's hard to look at rubber gloves
in the same old way.
$2,200-$3,200. Until July 16, 232 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108 |
