Handout
Let’s start with a clear-cut example: the art of Ken Nicol. Although he’s not entirely comfortable being called a conceptualist, the Toronto artist is certainly a big-ideas guy, and apparently one of those ideas is that art-making should involve a lot of mind-numbing, back-breaking, eyesight-destroying work.
If you think this sounds dour, think again. As Nicol sets himself these Herculean tasks, his work is filled with humour. He includes a couple of framed sheets where the mark is not his but rather the paw prints of a squirrel who ventured into his studio, proving his point about randomness.
Hold Everything Dear, her current exhibition at the Power Plant gallery, includes a large array of work, installation, sculpture, photography, even video, but much of it is very small. There is a series of little white ceramic ladders, and another of monochromatic postcard-sized landscapes painted on tidy pieces of tin. A whole wall is taken up by a display of unevenly shaped stoneware tiles glazed in various dazzling shades of deep blues.