Though the works in this show vary in scale, three generously proportioned canvases loom large in my memory, but I'll stick to writing about one: a massive spectre in silver and cerulean blue titled Lunar Caustic. When critic Gary Michael Dault quipped that this is the flagship piece of the exhibit, he hit the proverbial nail on the head.
As yet, Lunar Caustic has no internet presence, and I won't take a camera into a gallery on principle. A quick disclaimer on the image below*: this detail is a background found on one of Collins' blogs, and the only visual reference to a wall-sized behemoth of a work made of torn and cracked, silver-basted translucent encaustic. This scarred, patched hide is occasionally pierced by strident patches of blue, a concentrated field of which bathes the top of the canvas. In it I recognize something of Moby Dick's terrible, enthralling beauty.
Please. See it in person.
 |
| *Supposed detail of Lunar Caustic, perhaps unfinished. |
Many of my friends know Nicole Collins personally, and as an OCAD painting professor, but before this show I was unfamiliar with her work. Rifling through her website, I came across an older and clearly pivotal work titled Waterwaywall. I am convinced that Waterwaywall and Lunar Caustic are genetically linked,… one quite literally gave birth to the other.
Waterwaywall was a somewhat accidental site-specific installation in a space Collins' had rented to show her work. Water damage had caused the paint to ripple and shear away from a blue stained plaster, and once Collins saw the potential of sublime beauty inherent in the space, she carefully began to remove the bubbling paint and allow the blue room to breath. The paint chips shorn from the wall were then gathered upside-down on the floor in a monument to Collins' meticulous intervention.
Fascinatingly, flipping this image upside down reveals a striking similarity in proportion and design to Lunar Caustic.
 |
| Nicole Collins, Waterwaywall, June 2008, industrial paint on plaster wall, water damage, paint chips at 1 Spadina Crescent, Room 112. Photo credit: Nicole Collins |
Nicole Collins wrote in her artist statement:
Only the paint that was easily dislodged was removed; overly vigorous scraping would remove too much of the delicate tracery being revealed.Close by on Ossington, Kate McQuillen's exhibit at O'Born Contemporary runs through December 23rd. Her solo show Conventional Weapons is based on truly excellent ideas exploring how terrorism and low-tech weaponry capitalize on mass fear. However, Conventional Weapons is sabotaged by the decorative bent of her "paintings" created with smoke on paper, and hung bereft of labels. I later found out that most of the smoke paintings were christened with edgy titles such as "Detonation," "Shock Front," or "Shaped Charge," which add essential context and hint at both interesting research and painterly control on McQuillen's part.
Surface tension results in a very consistent patterning. This looks like mud flats, river beds, wrinkle patterns in skin, mysterious text, mathematical equations.
This work is a collaboration between the architecture, the passage of time, water, gravity, the painters, the paint, and me.
My job was to complete it.
My disappointment was compounded by a total aesthetic disconnect in a work that supposedly evoked a home-made bomb — a Rubenesque cumulous cloud made of two-tone nails embedded into the front wall and a lackluster, not to mention unscathed, open red and white backpack slumped innocuously by the wayside. Only after reading the Exhibition Statement (written by the gallery) did I realize it was part of the installation, and the written treatment made it that much more laughable. I quote, "The horrific effect of the backpack tableau, frozen between the moment of detonation and resulting devastation, is immediate: it depicts the dual reality of both an unsuspicious, everyday personal object and a violent, carefully calculated surprise attack." …Horrific violent effect? I think not.
My longtime friend Kiran Phull who is an expert on the phenomenon of terrorism pointed to the offending, cheap backpack and said acidly, "The backpacks used to leave bombs in public places are always black."
Needless to say, the flawed Abandoned Backpack lacks the dramatic flair I've come to expect from explosions.
 |
| Installation view: Kate McQuillen, Conventional Weapons. Photo credit: O'Born Contemporary |
As you can see from the installation shot, there is a series of small works — black framed photographs — as well as a shelf of palm-sized faux home-made explosives in the rear of the gallery. But let's focus on the best of the smoke paintings!
Rupture is set apart from twin walls of smoke paintings, holding its own the end of this long gallery. This, I would argue, is the least pretty of the series — compared to its brethren, it makes you uncomfortable… Rupture makes you take that second look and read deeply into her landscape. In Rupture, process, media, and subject meld seamlessly to produce as a haunting reminder of the horrors of trench warfare in World War I.
 |
| Kate McQuillen, Rupture, 2011, smoke on Archer's Paper, 30 x 40. Photo credit: O'Born Contemporary |
Nonetheless, it's difficult to stand in awe of McQuillen's smoke works if you are already familiar with the gunpower paintings by blockbuster Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. (He's all kinds of wonderful, and I recommend you check out his Guggenheim retrospective I Want to Believe here.) Remember that series of white Toyotas, fiberoptically charged, and suspended from the heart of the Guggenheim oculus? That was Cai.
Unlike McQuillen, Cai commits to his idea wholeheartedly. Take, for example, this massive gunpowder piece which preceded the epic free falling car installation of 2008:
 |
| Cai Guo-Qiang, Nine Cars*, 2004, gunpowder and ink on paper, 160 x 240". Image credit: artist. *Note: this is one half of a diptych |
After a second glance, the outlines of cars in various states of detonation can be seen, tumbling across his paper canvas. (For those of you who are curious, the first few times Cai worked with gunpowder on paper, his studio was nearly engulfed in flames. Eventually, he realized the paper needed to be wet for his idea to work.)
While McQuillen hoped to find the intersection between domesticity and unsanctioned wholesale destruction, she is unfortunately a neophyte and must cede to the Master of this subject.
So if you find yourself on Queen West with only 15 minutes to spare, know that I would not hesitate to choose Collins' Lunar Caustic over McQuillan's noncommittal backpack.
