The art fair occurred again this year, transpiring in the port last weekend. According to their ad copy:
Plural celebrates the best of contemporary art in Canada. Created by and for galleries, the fair brings together and presents the plurality of voices and works in contemporary art from across the country. It elevates art market practices: on the one hand, with a rigorous selection of galleries presenting carefully chosen artists and works; on the other, through accessible programming addressing current themes in the field of the arts. Plural fosters the discovery of new voices and forms of expression in cutting-edge contemporary art, while cultivating a spirit of community within the Canadian arts community.
Rather than reviewing that event as I did last year, I attended what could be termed its complement (it was not a rival). Singuliers occurred in the workshop building of Fonderie Darling from April 11th to 14th and runs from the 11th to the 29th at Agrégat (I’m limiting my comments to the first location). The event was advertised as bringing
together contemporary artists from outside the gallery environment to give visual arts professionals, collectors and the general public an opportunity to discover other artists while accessing works at an affordable price, thereby promoting the socio-economic development of artists and artist-run centres. As well as providing a showcase for these artists, the aim of the event is to create a collective space for meeting, sharing, mobilising, engaging and taking a stand on the economic issues facing artists.
Spread over three floors, most of the work was split into individual studio spaces that tended only to be occupied by the work of one or two artists. There was a plastic-covered sheet dropped somewhere in each space with the artist’s name, titles, sometimes an artist statement, or some details from a CV. The artists tended to sit in the corners, some staring blankly into space, some talking to the few guests, some eating. There was an overall sound of the creaking of wooden floors, microwaves, and utensils scratching against plates.
When I attended there were not many people present: a few families with small children, a couple of elderly people, and a few people clearly from university programmes. It did have an underwhelming tourist event quality to it. Being underwhelming about it is an achievement in that part of the city.
From what I can gather, most of the work on display was five to ten years old, unsold leftovers that have been shoveled in without much thought or care. Most of it has been shown elsewhere and, as with Plural, quite a bit of it was stuff that I had already seen in one form or another. It had the overall feeling of someone’s haphazard collection pulled together with very few choices. As with Plural, the mode of display did not do much to show off the work at its best. The works themselves varied significantly in quality, some pretty good and some rather bad.
As with art fairs in general, it accidentally highlights how important the supplemental superstructure is to the work. Although a few of the works contain statements that place the works in some theoretical or political context, most of them lack this. The general framing for the show also eschews the usual rhetorical condiments set on the table to distract from the stuff itself.
As an exhibition, this theme was related in an appropriate but rather casual way. Rather than fetishize the commodity object through the various cultural discourses that Plural relies on for its laundering of art, Singuliers fetishized the fantasy of labour, although that is something we encounter once in a while anyway. Here, it was more haphazard than by design.
Conveniently exploiting the location to good effect, the spectacle of labour seemed built into the whole mode of display. The ambient surroundings of the old foundry with its numerous heavy tools still dwelling in corners, its pipes flexing and gleaming across the walls, the ceilings and the brick and masonry walls exposed to suggest their historical haunting all did more for the works on display than the white cubicles of Plural could have. As a presentation space, it was not the pure nowhere of the now but the fantasy of a product with some historical depth.
Most of the work did not really fulfill the promise introduced by its setting. As far as the various strategies of display went, it was practical and unremarkable.
There were some wigs and pebbles and stuff that looked like craftwork people drop off at the Sally Ann. There were some mirrors with therapeutic bromides scribed over their surfaces, some abstraction, some magic realist-type figuration, some sculptural clumps and stacks of trash. There were paintings of fabric and bras that attempted to infuse these pieces of clothing with some type of pathos.
Some of the work could have been usefully put together to provide interesting juxtapositions that would have either complemented it thematically or complicated it. For instance, Maryam Izadifard and Claudia Bernal could have been nicely set side by side. Cluca’s various dog works were relatively effective in their use of one corner of the hallway.
While publicity for the event first directly parodied the PR for Plural (“Created by and for artists who are not represented in galleries”) it went on to give them some familiar political substance by suggesting that it aimed “to celebrate a plurality of marginalised practices and present artists who are sometimes - or too often - excluded from the artistic sphere.” However, it is hard to determine what this means. From what I could see on the inventories, there was not any practice present here that you could not find comparable at the art fair.