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Lauren Hall at Peak Gallery March 31 - April 24, 2010 |
Globe and Mail April 17, 2010 Until April 24, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108, www.peakgallery.com |
Lauren Hall’s way of moving wittily and persuasively between the realms of representation and non-representation – drawing upon each, but committing herself to neither – is uncanny. She’s as Canadian as the devil (all those mountain tops!). And she’s as new as the deadpan visual punning she perpetuates when she uses materials such as pallet wrap, polystyrene, bubble wrap, aluminum and, in the case of one work, a “polystyrene parabolic louver with lighting panel” as simulacra of rock, snow and ice. Take her piece Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom (whose title comes from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem Mont Blanc). Here, 15 sleek turquoise triangles, made of Styrofoam and aluminum trim, lean against the far wall of the gallery like a distant mountain range. They should seem crass, but they don’t. They should seem funny, but they aren’t. Not quite, anyhow. What they are is pointed (and I don’t mean in the geometric sense). They are, I guess, mountains for our time; the mountains we perhaps deserve.
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