R6 O THEGLOBEANDMAIL | SATURDAY,FEBRUARY22,2020
E
nter the lobby of Toronto’s Museum
of Contemporary Art these days
and you will find yourself in a pleas-
ing space defined by a colonnade of
old steel pillars and crossbeams whose pale
painted surfaces are peeling artistically. Or
maybe not.
Look up and around, and you’ll quickly
realize the steel is actually corrugated card-
board masterfully assembled with packing
tape, while the peeling paint is atrompe
l’oeileffect. MOCA’s building in the Lower
Junction Triangle is a former auto-parts
plant and one of those hip renovations of
abandoned industrial spaces, but in this in-
stallation by artist Carlos Bunga, the histor-
ic architecture is a contemporary illusion.
In a place where local workers once made
auto parts for a U.S. manufacturer (and, be-
fore that, rolled sheet metal for Alcan), an
artist now labours with the discarded pack-
aging of the rich and the housing materials
of the poor. The playful colonnade is glob-
alism’s Potemkin village.
Bunga, a Portuguese artist based in
Spain, is one of three artists who have cre-
ated site-specific work at MOCA this month
as the contemporary art institution contin-
ues to define itself and its new old place.
Tower Automotive declared bankruptcy in
2005 and closed its Toronto plant in 2006;
MOCA moved into the building in 2018 and,
ever since, it has been stumbling about try-
ing to stake out some territory that is both
cutting-edge and community-oriented.
These current installations form one of its
most successful efforts so far: All three art-
ists are showing work that is accessible and
smart, satisfyingly engaged with the histo-
ry, architecture and neighbourhood
around them.
For more background on the building,
start on the fourth floor, where the Cana-
dian artist Shelagh Keeley has created a
work around her own archival photo-
graphs of Tower Automotive during its in-
tervening years as a graffiti-covered squat.
She juxtaposes photos of its suffering sur-
faces of cracked tiles and flaking paint with
her own quasi-architectural drawings of
green shapes and spaces, displaying these
fractured and transitional images in the
midst of the sharper, cleaner architecture
that has replaced them. The effect of elegy
and decay is heightened by some hauntingShelaghKeeleyTONIHAFKENSCHEID/MOCATORONTO
CarlosBungaTONIHAFKENSCHEID/MOCA
MeganRooneyTONIHAFKENSCHEID/MOCATORONTOTGAM
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| ARTS&BOOKS