Tishan Hsu's ears-screen-skin with casts: Toronto, a new installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, with Double Bind of 1989 visible in the background.Laura Findlay/Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto
Twenty years ago, New York artist Tishan Hsu was examining his son’s Lego, noting the grid of plastic buttons. He took a section and tried making a rough mould, fashioning a misshapen copy in skin tones of pinky beige. He photographed the results and put the hybrid surface he had created into Photoshop to add lips, eyes and protruding arms at various points.
This unsettling piece, Interface Remix of 2002, was the source of Hsu’s current work, using Photoshop and a touch of AI to create swathes of vinyl skin that cover an entire wall, and a car-shaped sculpture, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. Adding images of biomorphic cavities and three-dimensional grab bars attached like arms, these hybridized installations render the body as a form of replicated technology.
MOCA often organizes its shows floor by floor with the most accessible beginning at ground level in the free-admission lobby and moving up from there. So, on the third floor, this show is the toughest of a strong fall lineup that includes three Toronto debuts, for Hsu, the Philadelphia artist Alex Da Corte and the B.C. artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. Both Da Corte and Yahgulanaas experiment with existing narratives and iconography – the first artist destabilizing pop-culture imagery while the second riffs on Haida stories and styles. Hsu, meanwhile, considers the interface between technology and our bodies.
Another very early Hsu work, Double Bind of 1989, approaches the subject with formal subtlety: This clever piece features a block of brown subway tile framing an image of a chest X-ray, and dotted with small biomorphic protrusions alongside references to public facilities – a metal sink and a sunken handhold. The sculpture is held together with General Motors branded seatbelts.
But once Hsu made Interface Remix, his work became visually seamless and much more aggressive as it mixes references to the fragile bodies of humans and animals with endless digital replication. The car-shaped sculpture, entitled mammal-screen, and the site-specific wall, ears-screen-skin with casts: Toronto feature an unsettling repurposing of the commercial vinyl used to wrap ads onto buses. The surfaces are both familiar and unrecognizable.
Mammal-screen, which evokes both cars and the big cats, is covered in a magnified weave-like pattern, part hair, fur or eyelashes, part grid, and also includes an image that looks like a cross between an ear and a nostril. The two-sided wall, meanwhile, has a pink skin continually interrupted by mouths or vaginas as well as an X-ray image of a vastly elongated spine that runs along the front. The surfaces are never consistent, filled with ruptures and glitches.
Hsu has been asked if he is a futurist and replies, “I was responding to what I saw in the present.”
Alex Da Corte's Rubber Pencil Devil, a 2018 work featuring 57 short videos dissecting pop culture imagery, is seen at MOCA.Laura Findlay/Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto
His work requires us to stop and look again – is that a mouth? – which is, after all, a central technique of visual art. Da Corte, another American artist, has mastered that trick with elan. His 2018 series of 57 short videos, Rubber Pencil Devil, has been mounted as a four-screen installation at MOCA, with the colourful videos showing in large boxes that makes the space feel rather like a playroom.
And these videos are playful: wickedly so. Da Corte, often casting himself as the characters, takes familiar figures from popular culture and places them in ironic microdramas slowed to half-speed. A simpering Mr. Rogers, his smile almost predatory, comes through the front door and puts his shoes on deliberately, or opens a McDonald’s Happy Meal only to find a crushed piece of tinfoil from which a Disney bluebird emerges. The Pink Panther paints a wall pink or lies on an ironing board to iron himself. Two assistants pour a bucket of Gatorade over a man with the Michael Myers mask from the Halloween movies perched on top of his head. The slow motion allows the viewer to recognize the ubiquitous imagery, before delving into a deconstruction that questions the banality of pop culture, celebrating its familiarity while exposing its many contradictions and hypocrisies.
The exhibition includes Da Corte’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear), the large personal collection of props, models and toys that inspire his work, such as a crocheted pot of flowers, a Jar Jar Binks mask and a reproduction of the Constantin Brancusi sculpture The Kiss.
In Daalkaatlii Diaries, a new series of 26 paintings commissioned by MOCA, Vancouver artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas expands Haida art with images of resilience in the face of flood, fuel spills and epidemics.Laura Findlay/Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto
Yahgulanaas is also playing with existing imagery, in his case expanding the familiar Haida graphic style, known as formline art, with its rounded black outlines, red lozenges and geometric voids. In the 1990s, Yahgulanaas, a Vancouver artist of Indigenous and settler heritage who grew up on Haida Gwaii, invented what has been dubbed the Haida manga, using the looser Japanese style for graphic novels to tell his own stories. These have been both published as books and displayed as art.
This show, his first Canadian exhibition east of the Rockies, features an installation of the pages from RED, his manga of 2008 telling the story of how the tribal chief Red sets out to rescue his kidnapped sister. When the pages are torn out of the book and mounted in sequence, an overall pattern of black lines appears, tracing totem-like figures over the whole. The panels under that pattern feature colourful faces and landscapes visually influenced by traditional Haida art but greatly expanding its palette and its naturalism.
Indeed, Yahgulanaas repeatedly breaks the rules that make Haida art both so distinctive and so uniform, fashioning his own art from his heritage. The core of the MOCA show is a newly commissioned suite of 26 large paintings, Daalkaatlii Diaries, installed on the ground floor in a two-side S-curve, as though spilling out of an accordion book. The colourful work, the artist’s style almost painterly now, places figures in landscapes and seascapes to tell stories of floods, fuel spills and epidemics, the crises that the Haida will rise above.
One painting, showing a red-spotted face at the bottom, is titled Variola Douglas, a reference to the 19th-century British Columbia governor James Douglas who, the Haida believe, encouraged the spread of smallpox among the First Nations. The 1862 smallpox epidemic killed thousands of Haida, greatly reducing the nation’s population. And yet, today, Yahgulanaas’s vivid art is testament not merely to resilience but to vitality and contemporaneity.
MOCA’s fall shows continue to Jan. 26.