Yorkville Art Galleries
Toronto’s largest gallery district, all within walking distance
1) Gallery Gevik
12 Hazelton Avenue
416.968.0901 [email protected] http://www.gevik.com
Until Oct 29:Daphne Odjig: Centenary
Daphne Odjig’s paintings, drawings and prints
span over fifty years and on this centennial
anniversary of the artist’s birth, Gallery Gevik
is pleased to present a career-spanning
retrospective and celebration, showcasing rare
works from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Opening November 2:Rita Letendre: From
the ArchivesRita Letendre is considered one of
the most eminent living abstract artists in Canada
and Gallery Gevik is pleased to present a special
exhibition of never-before-seen early works from
the artist’s formative period and beyond. The
Artist will be present from2–4pm.2) Ingram Gallery
24 Hazelton Avenue
416.929.2220 ingramgallery.com @TorontoART
RACHEL BERMAN (1946-2014)
Still Travelling
On now until October 25
Up next:
JANE EVERETT
Slipstream
November2–21
Artist’s opening celebration:
Saturday, November 2 | 2pm to 4pm3) Mira Godard Gallery
22 Hazelton Avenue
416.964.8197 godardgallery.com
VICTOR CICANSKY
The Garden of Art is a Never-Ending Story
New Bronze and Ceramic Sculptures
Opens Today
ARTIST PRESENT
Representing Canada’s important artists including
Alex Colville, Tom Forrestall, David Milne,
Christopher Pratt, Mary Pratt, Jeremy Smith,
Takao Tanabe
Since 1962 Mira Godard Gallery has been
purchasing and consigning important Canadian
and international art
Please contact the gallery4) Odon Wagner Gallery
196 & 198 Davenport Road
416.962.0438 odonwagnergallery.com
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR
OCTOBER 25-27, 2019
Please join us at Booth A14.
RICARDO MAZAL
NOVEMBER 15 - DECEMBER 3, 2019
Opening Reception:
Friday, November 8, 6-9pm
Internationally renowned artist, Ricardo Mazal
will have his 3rd solo feature with Odon Wagner
Contemporary. Mazal’s body of work consists of
a synthesis of painting, photography and digital
technology, exploring ideas of life, death and
burial rituals, spanning across cultures and time
periods. His intrigue lies with his emphasis on
pure line, colour, and geist, fulfilling the need for
the “spiritual in art”.
Subscribe to our newsletter through our website
for monthly updates at odonwagnergallery.com.
facebook.com/odonwagnergallery
instagram.com/odonwagnergallery
twitter.com/owgallery5) Loch Gallery
16 Hazelton Avenue
416.964.9050
[email protected] http://www.lochgallery.com
Fall Selection: Group Exhibition
October 19 - 26th
Opening today!
Loch Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition
of new and recent paintings by Philip Craig,
Leon Belsky, Ron Bolt, DP Brown, John Hansen,
Bogdan Molea, Shannon Craig Morphew,
Roberto Rosenman, David Thauberger, and
W. David Ward.6) Alan Klinkhoff Gallery
A Tradition of Fine Art Dealers Since 1949
New gallery opening Sept. 26 at 190 Davenport Rd.
416.233.0339 | [email protected] | klinkhoff.ca
Sale of an Important British Columbia
Collection & Select Masterpieces
In our Montreal gallery and at Klinkhoff.ca
Featuring paintings by J.E.H. MacDonald,
Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, LeMoine FitzGerald,
Kathleen Morris and others.
PURCHASES, SALES & APPRAISALS
Alan Klinkhoff Gallery specializes in artwork of the
highest quality, that is outstanding in its class, and
of recognized and enduring value.7) CFA (Canadian Fine Arts)
88 Scollard Street
416.544.8806 canadianfinearts.com
Works available by Jackson - Harris - Casson -
Varley - Carmichael - Borduas - Riopelle - Dallaire- Pellan - Letendre - Iskowitz and others
For over 40 years, CFA has offered historical
works of art for purchase. CFA focuses on the
Canadian Impressionists, Group of Seven, Beaver
Hall, Automatistes, Plasticiens, Painters Eleven
and select contemporary art.
Exhibiting October 24 - 27
BYDEALERS ART FAIR
325 Front St. West
Enjoy contemporary and
historical work by
emerging and established
Canadian, International
and Indigenous artists.»GALLERY LISTINGS
8) Galerie de Bellefeuille Toronto
87 Avenue Road, Suite #2
416.900.3268
debellefeuille.com | [email protected]
Metis Atash
October 30 – November 12, 2019
Opening reception:
Wednesday October 30, 5:30-7:30pm
Artist in attendance
Galerie de Bellefeuille is proud to announce that it will be
hosting its first solo exhibition of works by artist Metis
Atash. The artist employs a unique technique of sculpting in
fiberglass, working with a mixture of acrylic and automotive
lacquer and finishing with thousands of Swarovski crystals.
Each artwork is breathtaking! Her popularity and visibility
has grown around the world. This exhibition is among her
most ambitious to date. Come and meet the artist!RACHEL BERMAN(1946-2014)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
and Tomorrow, 2003
Oil on Linen
32x27in.
Ingram GalleryJEAN-PAUL RIOPELLE
Untitled, 1970
Oil on panel
10.5 x 13.75 in.
Canadian Fine ArtsRICARDO MAZAL
SP Black 18, 2019
Oil on linen
77 x 113 in.
Odon Wagner GalleryDAPHNE ODJIG
Emerging from a Dream, 1980
Acrylic on canvas
30x24in.
Gallery GevikSATURDAY,OCTOBER19,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAILO ARTS | R11
T
here’s a moment in Anar
Ali’sNight of Powerthat is
fleeting and can be achingly
relatable to anyone who’s learned
to get comfortable with a partic-
ular kind of vanishing act as a way
of getting by. A young man, born
outside his home country and liv-
ing in an environment that
doesn’t encourage complex nar-
ratives about immigration, learns
to shrink himself to the size of an
assumption.
Co-workers, acquaintances
and people he meets at weddings
mostly think he’s Indian, or some
version of what the label – which
itself houses a litany of identities,
histories – implies. He’s Cana-
dian. He’s brown. Why wouldn’t
he be? Why bother explaining the
rest of it?
“Saying anything would only
lead to endless questions, as if he
were an expert, a guide at a mu-
seum,” Ali writes of Ashif Visram,
one of three characters whose
stories frame the shifting-per-
spective structure of the novel,
her first book since her 2009 col-
lection,Baby Khaki’s Wings. And
so Ashif shoves the rest of it aside;
that he was born to an Ismaili
family in Uganda weeks before Idi
Amin’s expulsion of South Asians
from the country; that he spent
his infancy in a refugee camp
with his mother, Layla, while his
father, Mansoor, stayed on in a fu-
tile attempt to save the family
business; that his troubled home
and 1980s Alberta upbringing
have never quite afforded him
the tools to address what a forced
uprooting and the multigenera-
tional effects of domestic abuse
can do to a life.
Ashif leaves Calgary and his
family home at the first opportu-
nity. He moves to Toronto and
finds a ladder to climb at some
multinational corporation by
handling downsizing strategies,
which he hates. In doing so, he
shirks Mansoor’s wish to join his
latest failing venture, while out-
pacing his father’s failed career
and indulging his own habit of
self-abnegation all at once.
His apartment is spare of furni-
ture, he has trouble with roman-
tic attachment and he persists in
work he despises to secure his
parents’ financial stability in re-
tirement – a plan he expects will
take him into his forties. That’s
when he will figure out who he is
and what he wants, Ashif tells
himself. That’s when he’ll be free.
This faulty logic is a form of self-
delusion not unlike the kind his
father entertains when thinking
about what makes an immigrant
life in Canada successful. Sadly,
this isn’t the worst way in which
Ashif reproduces his father’s
faults.
Told in two parts,Night of Pow-
er’s first half handily powers
through contemporary Ugandan
history, scales the Ismaili Muslim
community’s place in it, and de-
livers both into the setting of
1970s multicultural-policy-era
Canada, a version of the country
with, for better and worse, a last-
ing mythology.On a business trip to Calgary,
Ashif visits his parents. His moth-
er informs him that Mansoor’s
dry-cleaning business is perilous-
ly in debt and asks for help, not
realizing that doing so sends Ash-
if’s 10-year retirement plan out
the window. This leads to a fa-
ther-son confrontation and, soon
after, a crisis on Laylat al-Qadr, a
holy night on the Islamic calen-
dar and from which the book
draws its title, that forces the Vis-
rams to address these fault lines.
Though the concept wasn’t
new at the time, Zadie Smith’s in-
troduction of the term “original
trauma” in her first book,White
Teeth,provided a useful short-
hand for how first-generation
parents “can’t help but re-enact
the dash they once made from
one land to another, from one
faith to another, from one brown
mother country into the pale,
freckled arms of an imperial sov-
ereign.”
Night of Power, which is set
close to the time ofWhite Teeth’s
publication, is an original traumastory, too – and this is the heart of
the book’s second half. True to
how trauma works, it’s not always
clear which of the historical
wounds that Ashif, Layla and
Mansoor flash back to inform the
present-day time frame of the
book’s plot. They often bleed into
each other. Mansoor carries his
abusive upbringing with him to
his new life, and at times into his
marriage. It infects his ability to
identify when his life is going well
and convinces him his family is to
blame when it is not. Despite
finding a tight-knit fabric in Cal-
gary’s Ismaili community, Layla
feels isolated in her marriage and
from early in his life leans on Ash-
if for support.
Ali herself has describedNight
of Poweras “Death of a Salesman,
set in an immigrant family,” and
for a number of reasons – its
themes, its character motivations- this is true. But, writing a novel
operating in the space of Cana-
dian diasporic literature, Ali de-
clines to take chances to push the
narrative outside what the genre
has come to expect of such sto-
ries. Troubled connections with a
homeland; overbearing parents;
societal pressure to model a very
limited view of what a successful
second-gen life looks like: Much
of the genre tells multiple ver-
sions of this story, as if this is the
only set of drives that characters
such as Ashif can have in contem-
porary fiction. Shafina, Ashif’s
Rumi-quoting, art-obsessed,
Prince-loving high-school girlf-
riend feels like the promise of an
inversion of that expectation, un-
til she disappears for much of the
book and reappears briefly as a
photojournalist for Al Jazeera,
presumably having attained the
satisfaction of a true life’s calling
that Ashif has not.
What is also unclear is how the
conclusion of some of the story’s
trauma cycles fits into the way
those types of trauma are dis-
cussed today. In the final quarter
of the book, we learn of two sep-
arate incidents in which Mansoor
and Ashif physically assault a
loved one, then recoil from the
act and hide it away in some cold
corner of their minds. The timing
of this reveal doesn’t afford much
space to meaningfully connect
these acts of violence to the
book’s ending, particularly in the
case of the women affected.
We begin the book by learning
about what Mansoor wants oth-
ers to believe about him and his
success and what his son lets oth-
ers believe about him simply to
get by. But what fictions have the
two repeated to themselves in or-
der to reduce the harm they be-
lieve they’ve caused others? And,
more importantly, how have
those they’ve hurt refused to re-
duce themselves in a similar way?
It is tempting to imagine a third
beat to this novel, one that af-
fords more time to considering
the kinds of self-reduction that
cycles of abuse incite and how
some survive, even overcome,
them.SpecialtoTheGlobeandMailChantalBraganzaisadigitaleditor
atTVO.How‘originaltrauma’canfracturelives
AnarAli’stwo-part
novelexploresthe
strugglesofanIsmaili
familyfleeingto
Albertainthe1970s
CHANTALBRAGANZA
BOOKREVIEWNightofPower
BYANARALI
VIKING,233PAGES
AnarAlidescribeshernewbook,NightofPower,as‘Deathofa
Salesman,setinanimmigrantfamily.’