Alex Turgeon - Waste Land

“A continuation of one of the most important, and ever-pressing, conversations in late capitalism”

by

One thing leads to another, as the old adage goes. A Toronto developer put up some hoarding around a construction site, which gave a passerby a canvas to scrawl an unsolicited opinion: “a ugly condo for ugly peeps.” 

That opinion provided fodder for Alex Turgeon’s debut solo show in a Canadian public gallery, Waste Land, on view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin in Lethbridge through Sept. 28.

A student of where poetry and urban space overlap, Turgeon has exhibited his concrete poems and installations that reflect on the built environment both nationally and internationally. Waste Land should be taken as a whole installation. Yes, there are strong individual pieces on view, but they are in concert with one another and are better together. 

Turgeon’s explorations in concrete poetry led him to create an immersive installation, employing bespoke wallpaper that, from a distance, resembles an innocuous lattice but in fact is the more insidious fencing used to delineate construction sites in urban settings. Upon a closer look, the grayscale pattern of Privacy Screen (Lattice), 2024, is the graffitied epithet turned into a concrete poem, climbing and falling and criss-crossing the walls of SAAG’s upper gallery, its large curved windows dotting the space and reminding us viewers we are located in a retrofitted building with its own history and storied past. 

Twin Towers (Fraternal), 2022, is a diptych of concrete poems framed individually and placed atop the wallpaper, and pinpoints the dissolution of promised utopia. These ethereal renderings of the CN Tower and Fernsehturm Berlin are comprised of punctuation marks made on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. The mid-century architectural subjects, respectively, represent the expansion of the Canadian nation state as well as the democratized broadcaster of information (alongside escapism) via television in a still divided Germany. With too many commas, ampersands, and hashtags to count, delineating steel, glass, and skyline, this diptych alludes to the potential of a “room with a view” that a developer might use as a sales strategy. 

This device of the modernist/futurist/international architectural marvel is revisited in the adjacent found object sculpture, Price Point, 2024. A cluster of souvenir replicas of various towers are assembled into a red and white run-of-the-mill birdcage that rests upon an altered music stand surrounded by a tumbleweed. Visitors to, and perhaps residents of, any such skyline of skyscrapers might sigh at the ridiculous reality of this facsimile to a neighbourhood with a cost that has overshadowed its previous value; a place with no gay bars, baths, bookstores or other touchstones of queer social life.

What underscores this rumination on development is its “ugly” cousin gentrification, and more expressly how its capitalist history has forced queer and other marginalized citizens from their homes and haunts to make room for more respectable (i.e. upper crust) landowners. 

Nowhere throughout Turgeon’s installation is this driven home better, or with more tantalizing nuance, than with the assemblage Open-Faced Closet (Renoviction), 2024. No bigger than one square foot, this arrestingly curious work acts as a palimpsest, referring to layers of history and decades of activities (both in the shadows, and present enough to ground community). The push and pull of layered imagery from commercial sources (catalogues, calendars, pinups and more), acts as a linchpin for the conversation Turgeon presents. The specific neon yellow of a swim brief worn by  some hunk, the upright but languid peach gladioli, a truncated dull but sturdy straw broom, and an unrecognizable mechanical apparatus are all equally flattened into a collage that is simultaneously inside and beyond the domestic sphere. Was this once, the artist asks us to consider, a beautiful room for beautiful people?

The way cities have been shaped and then re-shaped as though its communities have never loved, or fucked, or fought to survive there, is among the worst by-products of the proliferation of development we are witnessing today. And so, Waste Land is a continuation of one of the most important, and ever-pressing, conversations in late capitalism. ■

Alex Turgeon: Waste Land is on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin in Lethbridge through Sept. 28.

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