In the Galleries
Into the Groove
The art world has an acid flashback at Landymore Keith By David Balzer
While abstract expressionism continues to be seen as passé by the contemporary art world, psychedelia is back in a big way. This must be due to the increasing influence of a new generation of curators and artists—people who spent their formative years gazing at trippy Sesame Street and Electric Company segments, and the covers of their parents’ Big Brother and Holding Company LPs. Landymore Keith’s latest show, Metamorphic, which focuses solely on Canadian artists, proposes another reason: the renewed taste for the figurative and the illustrative has bled into abstract practices. Bonnie Lewis’s Ornamental series from 2005, for instance, is reminiscent of the seminal work of Push Pin Studios’ Milton Glaser, whose druggy visions never lacked narratives. In King Belly, Lewis tells a through-the-looking-glass story about femininity gone awry—the world, as it were, on and beneath the skirt. Her style, furthermore, is almost free of messy gesture; she outlines and colours in carefully. This is not abstraction a child could do, but it’s abstraction a child would love.
Metamorphic. Artwork $500–$4,000. Jan. 11 to Feb. 17. Landymore Keith Contemporary Art, 800 Dundas St. W., 416-361-3074, www.landymorekeith.com.
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