Power play

Your mind, retinas and, occasionally, your eardrums are pretty much guaranteed a workout when you take them to the Power Plant.

Since opening in April, 1987, the not-for-profit gallery on the Toronto waterfront has had its share of difficulties, especially with respect to staffing and governance (in one six-month stretch in 2012, for instance, it gained a new director while abruptly losing a curator, an associate curator and a president) as well as attendance (steadied, thanks to the introduction of a free admission policy in 2012, underwritten first by the Jackman Foundation, then the Bank of Montreal).

But for all the drama, the Power Plant has never relinquished its stature as one of the country's pre-eminent go-to venues for the freshest international contemporary art. Indeed, after a rather rocky first couple of years, PP director Gaetane Verna seems to have settled into her job and settled the institution in the process. In January, she filled a big vacancy of long-standing by naming the impressively credentialled German-born Carolin Kochling as curator of exhibitions. Kochling succeeds Sarah Robayo Sheridan, who, to considerable applause, had been named to the post in early 2013 only to resign in fall 2014.

In the meantime, proof of the Power Plant's continuing artistic viability can be found in its arresting winter program – three solo exhibitions, one each from Montreal-based artists Patrick Bernatchez and Aude Moreau, the third from New Yorker Leslie Hewitt. As is often the case with PP offerings, each show is headily Conceptualist and post-conceptualist in nature (#bigideasmatter!) and multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary in execution. (Although not that multidisciplinary: Since this is the second decade of the 21st century, there is, naturellement, not a painting in sight.)

Bernatchez, a Sobey Art Award finalist in 2010, perhaps best exemplifies the aesthetic. His presentation, titled Les temps inachevés (loosely translated: "unending times" or "times unfinished"), is drawn from two epic "cycles," Chrysalides, which he started in 2006, and Lost in Time, begun in 2009. Les temps consists of the following: 1) three installation works, one accompanied by a score – 12 compositions for two pianos and four hands – by Bernatchez; 2) one 46-minute video; 3) three shorter videos totalling about 34 minutes in duration; 4) a blow-up of a still from the 46-minute video, spread across three separated light boxes leaning against a wall. It's called In Search of the Day After.

As you've probably surmised, time, in all its manifestations minute and cosmic, is Bernatchez's big theme. Its most explicit presence is the installation called BW, a black wristwatch mounted inside a transparent cube atop a plinth. A microphone positioned behind the watch face transmits the sound of amplified ticking to four speakers, thereby making time incessantly, unavoidably audible. The watch, though, has no numbers and only one hand, which seems entirely immobile. This is because the timepiece, made between 2009 and 2011 by Bernatchez and a Swiss watchmaker, doesn't track seconds, minutes and hours but millennia – in other words, it purportedly takes the hand 1,000 years to fully rotate the watch's circumference. Bogus? Perhaps. But the idea of it is brilliant – a watch, literally, for the ages.

Time is also at the heart of another installation, Fashion Plaza Nights. Originally mounted in a former Montreal industrial building where Bernatchez once had his studio, it consists of two metal racks flanking a rotating metal spindle that holds a speaker column. Each rack has 50 or so pegs on six bars, with each peg holding a spool of white thread strung to the spindle. As the spindle rotates ever so slowly, to the meditative soundtrack of 12 compositions for two pianos and four hands, it gently tugs the threads around the column, creating a spherical shape reminiscent of a cocoon, a poof of candy floss or a hornet nest. Unsurprisingly, as the cocoon grows larger, the sound from the speaker becomes progressively muffled. As an experience, Fashion Plaza Nights is compulsively watchable while simultaneously provoking thoughts of de-industrialization (in this case of the Canadian textile industry), effacement and transformation.

The black watch puts in a guest appearance in Lost in Time – this being the title of the ambitious 46-minute film-to-digital transfer Bernatchez started work on two years ago. It's an astonishing piece of picture-making – think Kubrick's 2001 or Solaris and Stalker by Tarkovsky – with two parallel intercutting narratives that finally intersect. One follows a futuristic helmet-clad rider with what appears to be an oxygen tank on his back, sitting atop a large black horse whose head is covered with armour. Steed and rider go this way and that, on a spaced-out odyssey through a desolate, unmapped world of snow, ice and rock. (Mon pays … c'est l'hiver, indeed.) Eventually, the rider strikes out on foot, with fatal results (but not before coming across the black watch). In the second narrative, a mysterious, monolithic chunk of ice is loaded into a room in a scientific station where it steadily melts until its contents are revealed.

Projected on a floor-to-ceiling screen, Lost in Time' s 11 chapters plus epilogue are a ravishing feast for eye and ear (the soundtrack is a mix of Bach's Goldberg Variations and an original score by Mexican composer Murcof). The only flaw is a voiceover, with subtitles, intoning unnecessary cosmic mumbo-jumbo by the late French philosopher/neuropsychopharmacologist Henri Laborit – stuff such as "Man is the only species that knows he is going to die; man is also the only species that knows he is one species among many" and "If you can neither flee or fight, you inhibit yourself."

The Political Nightfall is the blanket title for Aude Moreau's presentation and, yes, it, too, has its engagement with time and space, historic and present. The exhibition includes four digital prints of the Toronto-Dominion Centre, the massive skyscraper "village" in downtown Toronto conceived by legendary architect Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s. The French-born Moreau calls the print series as well as an accompanying 40-second video loop, also of the TD towers, Less is more or …, a cheeky bit of fun with Mies's famous 1947 credo, "Less is more." The loop features a dizzying rotation of the towers – they're like models aspin on a turntable – with illuminated windows on each exterior wall of each building spelling one word from Moreau's four-word title.

This use of lighted windows, though, reaches its apotheosis in THE END in the Background of Hollywood, a 16-minute film Moreau made last year on location in southern California. It's a single take, long and steady – a slow zoom-out, essentially – of the Los Angeles skyline shot from a helicopter at night. At first, there's just the glittering city before us, then, as the camera pulls back, skyscrapers with brightly lit names and logos such as Deloitte and KPMG and Aon on their upper sections appear on the screen's left and right. Within a couple of minutes – that is, at the point when a lot of movies would start to roll their introductory credits – the word THE appears on the face of one building and END on another opposite, both words spelled by the strategic illumination of individual windows. Moreau's camera stays locked on those buildings until the distance covered by the retreating helicopter renders the words a blur. Yet even when the camera starts a seamless rightward tilt to take the viewer toward Hollywood, the now-far-off corporate towers remain in view, fixed at centre-screen, the axis of the camera's pivot. It's a powerful, mesmerizing, spooky work – Mammon, thy name is El Lay! – its impact heightened by an ominous non-stop soundtrack that sounds like the drone of a jet engine as heard from inside the cabin or a closely miked press roll on a kettle drum. Have I said it's my favourite thing in the entire Power Plant show?

Less satisfying is Leslie Hewitt's Collective Stance. As with the other exhibitions in the show, it's a mixed bag. There's a 17-minute dual-channel video installation, each channel perpendicular to the other, called Untitled (Structures) from 2012; a new three-channel installation, Stills, incorporating footage from the shooting of Untitled (Structures); and, also from 2012, an installation, titled Untitled (Where Paths Meet, Turn Away, Then Align Again), of five floor sculptures watched over by four wall photolithographs. The wellspring of Collective Stance is Hewitt's perusal a few years ago of hundreds of civil-rights-era photographs in Houston's Menil Collection. (Hewitt, who is African-American, splits her time between New York and the Texas city.) (Structures) consists of a series of silent, non-linear vignettes/tableaux – of African-American males and females, an office interior, a train crossing a bridge, a switch box, the exterior of a factory, a field of wheat – lensed in collaboration with fellow African-American cinematographer Bradford Young. Each was shot at sites significant to the era (Chicago, Memphis, Arkansas), a time also coterminous with the so-called Second Great Migration northward of African-Americans out of the U.S. South between 1940 and 1970. Undeniably brainy, dense and important, (Structures) is unfortunately a pretty dry art experience.

The same goes for Untitled (Where Paths Meet …). Its five steel floor constructions, sharply geometric in shape and pristine-white in colour, seem a comment on Minimalism's rise as a major art-world movement at the same time (the 1960s) as the civil-rights movement was convulsing the larger American society (the latter represented by the four small, smudgy wall lithographs, each derived from Hewitt's micro-lens photos of images from the Menil archive). As readers may recall, one of the great knocks on sixties art, including (and perhaps especially) Minimalism, was its separation or detachment from the socio-political upheavals of the day. White artists may have signed petitions, participated in protest marches and supported radical causes – but with few exceptions (Philip Guston, Leon Golub, James Rosenquist's F-111,Warhol's Race Riot series), their art failed to find what one critic called "an imaginative grasp of the epoch." As metaphor, (Where Paths Meet …) works; as an involving gallery moment, not so much.

Works by Patrick Bernatchez, Leslie Hewitt and Aude Moreau are on view in Toronto at the Power Plant, Harbourfront Centre, through May 15 (thepowerplant.org).