Alex Turgeon | Waste Land

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Alex Turgeon, “Open-Faced Closet (Renoviction) [detail],” 2024

mixed media (courtesy of the Artist)

Opening Reception: July 6, 7-9pm

A poem, like a city, communicates in concrete and empty space. Mexican conceptual artist and writer Ulises Carrión in his 1975 essay “The New Art of Making Books” writes that books are sequences of spaces and moments, not just containers of words. Artist Alex Turgeon extends this thinking to the spaces of the city, locating a queer subjectivity between the poetic realms of architecture and the built space of language. In Turgeon’s first solo exhibition at a public gallery in Canada, he employs concrete poetry, drawing, sculpture, and assemblage in examining the gentrification, division, and promised utopic unity of urban revitalization.

A focal point of Waste Land is Turgeon’s extended concrete poem presented as a mural across the walls of the gallery. The poem appears as a lattice fence, typical of those in suburban neighborhoods that divide property and act as a screen that partially obscures vision. The lattice is composed of a repeating text that reads, "a ugly condo for ugly peeps", a graffiti tag encountered by the artist written across a sign for a new proposed condo development in Toronto. Similar fencing around urban construction sites disrupts access to public spaces and obscures vision into the construction site beyond. Turgeon’s lattice fence motif also separates viewers from an unknown, infinite space beyond the gallery walls. The tension between the solid wall and the trompe l'oeil fence nods towards the divisionary architecture that is physically and ideologically built into our institutions.

Having previously resided in Berlin and now based in Toronto, Turgeon continues to contrast the iconic architectures of both cities, especially through the architectural type of the lookout tower. Scale models of the slender, pointed forms of the CN Tower, Berlin’s Fernsehturm, and the Calgary Tower, amongst others, are denied to viewers, encased within a birdcage. Each of these buildings have become iconic symbols for their respective cities, representing growth, commerce, and success. For those that venture to the top, the tower also confers god-like command over the city. Each tower’s declaration of prosperity is entwined in a phallic statement of patriarchal domination that is written in urban centres across the globe.

Turgeon’s Waste Land proposes that citizens should read between the lines that the city writes in. Like a book, the city too has margins, gutters, and borders that exist on the periphery of the main text. As Carrión writes, “The space is the music of the unsung poetry.” It is these supposedly empty margins of the city such as its grassy downtown lots or marked suburban developments where the cities of tomorrow are contested. The wasteland as an unproductive, public, and shared space is a prerequisite for the body of the city to communicate.