two things at the same time | June 27 - July 28, 2007

23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108

What's more fascinating than doubling and pairing? Not much, I'd say, and doppelganger echoing (what the gallery calls "the boundaries of simultaneity") generates a major part of the vitality everywhere in this absorbing exhibition of new work by a selected group of artists from San Francisco.

The work - and there's quite a lot of it - seems remarkably witty and charming (if not exactly profound). I found myself inexplicably drawn to Miriam Dym's grotty little pencil drawing of a garbage dump (Garbage No. 3) and more or less enchanted by Will Rogan's no doubt too-easily-winning photo of two almost symmetrical swans (Swans Through), both with their heads in the water.

Rogan has also supplied a funny and hair-raising video called Collapse, in which a motor scooter travels full-tilt through downtown Tokyo bearing a (foolhardy) rider who is holding a huge mirror in front of him in which he can see only what has just passed him by.

There is some smart painting here too - by Jim Gaylord, Alex Clausen and Jonn Herschend. For me, though, the highlight of the exhibition is a 41⁄2-minute PowerPoint presentation called Why This Is not Going to Work so Well, in which Herschend projects a proposal for an artist's project - a project so hopelessly, adorably confused and unworkable it makes your teeth ache.

Herschend's "presentation" is one long progressively worsening video stammer in which the hopeful but hapless artist begins to say irrelevant things such as "how a tornado will take some things and leave others untouched" and how one part of the proposal will be about "the romantic poets" (not many of whose names he can remember). "Someone will say Ozymandias," read the words on the screen, "and bump his head on a tree in the woods." We've all heard proposals like this, have we not?

about the exhibition