José Luis Torres, "Landscape," ODD Gallery, Dawson City, Yukon, Oct. 7 to Nov. 7, 2015

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Québec City artist José Luis Torres’ exhibition Landscape offers subtle conceptual readings of Dawson City’s setting and character. It also marks a strategic move to intimate object-based arrangements, a departure from the spectacular scale and quality of installations he has created at venues across Canada over the past decade. 

Architecture remains a key aesthetic trajectory for the Argentinian-born and -educated artist as evident in three gold-painted unfolded cardboard boxes placed on the gallery’s north wall. The shapes, creasing patterns and orientation of these pieces suggest basic residential floor plans; each also features a small cutout of human figures. His placement of recovered landscape photographs behind the silhouetted areas completes an adroit metaphor for how land and water ultimately dwarf people and buildings in this remote subarctic community.

Dawson City’s population fluctuates between approximately 1,400 residents in the fall, winter and spring to over 4,000 at the height of summer. Torres’ highly refined found-object combinations, particularly when compared to his larger and more affected manipulations of mattresses, car parts and furniture at Calgary’s Truck Gallery last year, evoke the annual reversion to a calmer atmosphere after tourists, service workers and miners depart en masse in late September. From October to April, locals can navigate downtown at a relaxed pace, unencumbered by gaggles of camera-wielding visitors.

Torres also expresses that social shift via coy references to pervasive forms of domestic architecture. A folding dollhouse spray-painted silver, a red plastic bungalow-shaped bird feeder and a faux log cabin bird feeder, all retrieved from the local landfill, are placed on the gallery’s south wall. Such an array of miniature house-like objects echoes Dawson’s simple residential streetscapes. Situated between the two unaltered feeders are two cheap plates with bas-relief imagery. These mass-produced ceramic knick-knacks, which the artist spray-painted silver, depict Tudor-style chateaus in majestic forests, a deft conceptual contrast to the modest cabins, trailers and bungalows on the town’s treeless lots.

The artist’s treatment of discarded cardboard, plastic and ceramic items with metallic paint implies a monetary value in opposition to their actual origin as refuse, while simultaneously underlining the importance of precious metals to the Yukon economy. At the close of Landscape, Torres’ ingenious creations will be returned to their source, most notably the Quigley landfill or “the dump” as it’s commonly called by Dawsonites. It’s a final act of cultural resistance to art’s commodification.

ODD Gallery-- Klondike Institute of Art & Culture

2nd Ave & Princess St (Bag 8000), Dawson City, Yukon Y0B 1G0

867-993-5005

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