SATURDAY,FEBRUARY22,2020 | THEGLOBEANDMAILO R 7paintings from the 1980s: tarps the colour
of dried blood featuring black, biomorphic
figures are displayed not on the walls but
on the floor.
One floor down, Megan Rooney, a Cana-
dian who works in Britain, greets the view-
er with sunshine yellow softened by deli-
cate pinks and purples in an abstract mural
she has painted over every wall in the gal-
lery. The effect is initially delightful, as
though you had been invited into a flower
garden on a summer day, but Rooney’s
sculptures suggest something less happy is
at work.
For an installation titledHush Sky Mur-
mur Hole, she has taken common bits of
street furniture – a shopping cart, oil cans,
traffic cones, market umbrellas – and turn-
ed them into unusual sculptures. The baby
seat on the shopping cart (from No Frills, of
course) is encased in a sleeve of gauze, sug-
gesting a lost or displaced child. She also
fits fabric over vertical traffic barriers so
they become odd little human figures with
their round lights signalling a head but no
face. A stuffed snake lies in one corner,
curled up in a quilted moving blanket.
There is a lot of humour in these repur-
posings, but Rooney also creates the atmo-
sphere of an unstable and unsettling
dream world just slightly removed from
MOCA’s actual urban setting. Dwelling in
this space, with its surprising contrast be-
tween its easy colours and its uneasy sculp-
tures, you begin to wonder whether you
can trust objects. Rooney pours sand over a
fuzzy pink bathmat so its fabric fingers are
almost unrecognizable as they stick up like
some underwater ghoul. If part of MOCA’s
mandate is to engage with the developing
neighbourhood at its doorstep, Rooney of-
fers a particularly imaginative response.
Bunga also includes found industrial
and commercial objects from the neigh-
bourhood – an old glass display case; a
metal art cabinet; a dismantled picture
frame – to create a handful of sculptures in
his main installation on the second floor,
but you can be excused if you don’t spot
them. The centrepiece of this room is a
showstopper: Bunga has carefully filled
the whole place with a grid of low packing
boxes, part of his international series of
site-specific cardboard installations.
You are welcome to take off your shoesand walk gently through the boxes, lifting
your feet to cross over each rim. But step-
ping back for an overview is also interest-
ing because it begins to raise questions of
scale: It is as though Bunga has created a
miniature city in the gallery – or a church
since the boxes also read as pews posi-
tioned beneath the gallery’s vault. The
work is simultaneously meditative and
participatory.
Like his colonnade in the lobby, the
cardboard boxes suggest ideas about la-
bour, shelter and garbage, but young vis-
itors are unlikely to think much about
those implications as they happily pick
their paths through the grid. This time
around, cutting-edge and community-ori-
ented have discovered co-existence.Works by Carlos Bunga and Shelagh Keeley
are showing at the Museum of Contemporary
Art until May 10; Megan Rooney’s Hush Sky
Murmur Hole runs until April 12.ContemporaryArt
ntityinthreeworks
0incemovingtoitscurrentlocationbthe2orontogallery
hasstruggledtoQeQothcuttingedgeandengaged
îithitscommunity½:iththeseinstallationsbthat
appearstohavefinallychangedbKateTaylorreportsSince it reopened on Sterling Road 17
months ago, the Museum of Modern Art in
Toronto has been inviting artists into its
new building to create site-specific installa-
tions; they have obliged with everything
from cardboard boxes to a felled tree. On
the other hand, MOCA has also launched a
new program that takes an entirely differ-
ent approach, coaxing existing artworks
out of private collections and into the pub-
lic gallery.
This month, The City is a Collection pro-
gram makes an impressive debut with the
exhibition ofImagesinDebris, an installa-
tion with video projections by the Amer-
ican artist Sarah Sze that is on loan from
collectors Audrey and David Mirvish.
Images in Debrisannounces itself with
a dark but sparkling projection of shim-
mering water that spills out on to the walls
beyond the gallery where it sits. The piece
itself, shown in darkness so that its projec-
tions are visible, is a wildly cluttered deskinspired by the artist’s own studio. Cov-
ered in paper, projectors, paint pots,
plants, cups, cables and clips, the desk fea-
tures an almost indescribable mess from
which a fabulous quantity of imagery
emerges. A light metal armature on the
desktop supports multiple irregular
screens, including some that are created
from dried latex paint drips.
On these jury-rigged surfaces, and on
the walls of the gallery, this latter-day
Rube Goldberg machine unevenly projects
videos of nature that suggest the passage
of time: a leopard runs, water flows,
clouds float. This fascinating contraption
can be read as a metaphor for how we
experience our image-saturated world –
and yet simultaneously it disrupts that ex-
perience.Sarah Sze’s Images in Debris is showing
at the Museum of Contemporary Art to
May 10.SarahSzeTONI HAFKENSCHEID/MOCAARTS&BOOKS |