At the Galleries

We trundled out in the heat today to catch a few art exhibitions. We were particularly interested in seeing Richard Gorman's work - he's a painter both Tuffy P. and I admire. His show featured small abstract paintings, thinly painted to demonstrate figure/ground colour relationships. They were well done, but they left me a little cold. While at the Morrow complex, we also saw Ron Shuebrook's work at Olga's, and Kathryn Dain's work at Peak Gallery. Shuebrook's show was a mixed bag of drawing and painting, including a group of small abstractions that were very well handled. Dain created a group of...well, I'm going to call them constructions....little wooden buttons of the sort that are used by cabinet makers, glued on wood panels set up as diptychs, such that there is an all-over composition. She uses this structure as the foundation for some interesting colour interplay. If I was making these things, I would have grown tired of the dots after one or two - no chance I would stick it out for a whole show. That said, some of them were quite effective.

Finally, we drove over to Dundas and Ossington to see Craig Porter's show in a hole in the wall gallery called "le." Mr. Porter's work falls within a persistant tradition of personal, anecdotal sculpture, from Joseph Cornell to artists like our own Tony Urquhart....and that's OK. His work is quirky, imaginative, funny, and inventive. Each of the pieces is very different from the others, yet the overall sensibility is intact. If I could send you to only one of the exhibitions we saw today, it would be to this one.