"OH, CANADA:" Reviewing Mass MoCA’s “sprawling, highly subjective and surprise-filled” show.

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Art Evans

"Widow"

Janice Wright Cheney, "Widow," wool, cochineal dye, velvet, taxidermy form, pins, wood, 2012. Courtesy of the artist with the support of the New Brunswick Arts Board.

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Patrick Bernatchez

Patrick Bernatchez Chrysalides Empereur

Patrick Bernatchez, "Chrysalides Empereur," 35mm film transferred in HD, 10 min, 2008 – 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

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Charles Stankievech LOVELAND

Charles Stankievech, "LOVELAND," video installation with objects, 5:10 min, 2011. Collection of Loto-Québec, purchased in partnership with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

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Kristan Horton

Kristan Horton Doorknob

Kristan Horton, "Orbits Series: Doorknob ed # 2/5," digital color photographs, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

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Timothy Harrison Raab

Garry Neill Kennedy Spotted

Installation view, "Oh Canada" at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Art Evans

Janice Wright Cheney Widow

Janice Wright Cheney, "Widow," wool, cochineal dye, velvet, taxidermy form, pins, wood, 2012. Courtesy of the artist with the support of the New Brunswick Arts Board.

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Chris Millar

"Uncharted Galvanized Hut"

Chris Millar, "Uncharted Galvanized Hut," acrylic on canvas, 2008. Private collection.

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Art Evans

Gisele Amantea

Gisele Amantea, "Democracy," flocking, 2012.

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"Cheerleading Pyramid, Uniqué"

Sarah Anne Johnson, "Cheerleading Pyramid, Uniqué," chromogenic print with acrylic ink, 2011. Collection of Max and Lucy Falconer.

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OH, CANADA

Reviewing Mass MoCA’s “sprawling, highly subjective and surprise-filled” show.

By Murray Whyte

I’ll spare you some disappointment up front: There is absolutely no way I’ll address each and every work in Oh, Canada, the sprawling, highly subjective and surprise-filled survey of Canadian contemporary art that opened at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art this spring.

This has less do with quality, interest, page space or anything else than the simple fact that the exhibition is packed to the rafters, and in the generous confines of Mass MoCA’s sprawling campus, housed in an old textile mill in North Adams, this is really saying something. Curator Denise Markonish set out five years ago to craft the show based on personal experience and face time, not the set agendas of an international art world enamoured of a certain group of British Columbian photoconceptualists, and as her experience grew, so did the show.

What started as a loose guess in 2007 —  a dozen or so artists, Markonish told director Joe Thompson — swelled by dozens as she logged air miles and no small amount of road time — most notably on the Dempster Highway between Inuvik and Dawson City with Charles Stankievech one frigid February day — forming her own vision of the true north, strong and free. Whatever else you might like to call Oh, Canada, it is certainly that: unshackled — or unconcerned, or both — by the established coterie of must-haves on the Canadian art checklist, Markonish’s take is fresh, inventive, surprising, counter-intuitive, remarkably insightful in spots, crowded and laboured in others, and overall, really big.

I could go on. One hundred-plus works of art made by 60-plus artists and collectives can leave one at a loss for adjectives. Even that many seems modest given Markonish’s initial list of 800 artists; of those, she visited 400 in their studios, devoting a minimum of an hour to each. And yet, Oh, Canada has a charming intimacy despite its volume. In an institution whose notable features include 30-foot vaulted ceilings, that’s no easy task, but Markonish is unintimidated (and likely a little chuffed) to present monumental works that maximize the space’s potential while holding true to her priorities.

Speaking of priorities, Markonish’s emerge quickly here. Even monumental works have a handmade feel. Kim Morgan’s towering cast-latex lighthouse drapes from floor to ceiling in the gallery’s most cavernous space. But you’re prepared for this from the get-go — from Janice Wright Cheney’s grizzly bear quilted with felt roses at the exhibition’s entrance through to the grisly fabric sculptures of Luanne Martineau, or the porcelain bone geodesic dome by David R. Harper, the work underscores the intimacy, which comes from Markonish’s intense interest in craft — the intricacies of the hand-made, radically re-imagined in a contemporary way.

This is surely a trend in contemporary art generally in recent years — if you saw the Whitney Biennial in 2010, you’ll know what I mean — and Canada is no exception. I’ve been observing the trend for some years. Interesting, then, that it takes a major survey from a foreign museum to put a fine point on a burgeoning movement right here in our home and native land. That’s partly because of the branded art-world identity Canada has laboured long to establish, via the international successes of such towering figures as Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham. As long ago as the 80s, their large scale photographic works (and in Graham’s case, videos) established a particular kind of mediated art-making as Canada’s global contribution, and the label stuck for a  long time, assuming a kind of Group-of-Seven-esque point of nationalistic, artistic pride, contemporary version.

The slow, solid ascent of artists in their wake not beholden to those specific priorities — Geoffrey Farmer, say, who showed at dOCUMENTA (13) this year, or the perennial stardom of Brian Jungen — has less to do with specific associations than geography. A star-studded senior cohort made Vancouver, in particular, a consistent destination for international curators; for too many of them, Canadian contemporary art of import was whatever was being made there, to the exclusion of too much else.

Markonish is not one of those. By deliberate choice, she avoided the big names, and if you count by region, you’ll see how studiously she adhered to that. The prairies account for 18 artists here, four from Saskatchewan, eight from Alberta, and six from Winnipeg. Ontario and Quebec have 10 each; the Martimes seven and the Yukon three, almost equaling the heretofore Canadian art powerhouse of British Columbia, with four.

There will surely be those who grouse at this apparent exclusion, but Markonish didn’t make a show to make them, or anyone else, happy. If anything, Oh, Canada’s sensitivities are less to the Canadian art establishment than to the country itself. Indigenous artists are well represented here, not by token but by genuine cohesion. Kent Monkman’s “Two Kindred Spirits” fits right in.

A campy diptych of dioramas that destabilize Hollywood-ized western lore (Tonto hovers over a prone Lone Ranger, in stoic concern) at the same time as it critiques institutional conventions like the diorama itself (a natural history museum trope much maligned for its ossifying effect on native cultures especially), Monkman’s work is cheeky, political and has an overt materiality, the presence of which runs through Oh, Canada as a taut connector.

Materiality emerges in ways both subtle and overt, and there’s none more the latter than Calgary’s Chris Millar. His dizzying installations have grabbed and held tight to imaginations both in Canada and beyond (more dizzying, in fact, when you realize that these intricate amalgamations of pop-cultural cast-offs are a form of three-dimensional painting, and not, as they appear to be, bricolage), and he’s given pride of place here at the entrance to one of four distinct portions of the show.

In an exhibition where square footage is at a premium, Millar gets plenty, and it’s hard to think of a work more deserving. At the same time, here’s where Oh, Canada gets a little tough to take. Arm’s length from Millar’s work is Kristan Horton’s captivating “Haptic Sessions ed #1/3,” a painstaking manual animation of various bits — a set of keys, a lighter, a gum wrapper, a matchbook — found on the street in different cities that Horton set in motion using a flatbed scanner (it’s presented as a video).

It both baffles and enthralls in the implied labour of its digital self, but step too far back to drink it in, though, and you trip over Millar’s work. And that’s to say nothing of the low rumbling coming from the closet-sized theatre just the other side of the wall, where Patrick Bernatchez’s darkly absurd video, of Ronald McDonald trapped in a submerging car unspools. Watch your step here, too, because Clint Neufeld’s cast-porcelain tractor engine, a remarkable feat of craft and imagination, is shoved in the hallway next to the door.

Overstuffed can signal a genuine exuberance, an emotional connection so truly felt that not a single other work can be left out, and Markonish certainly has that. But overstuffed is also just overstuffed, and several times I felt as though the show might have benefited from a few exclusions, the better to let the remaining works breathe. Markonish’s curatorial instincts are bang-on in so many cases, like the intuitively perfect juxtaposition of Michael Snow’s hypnotic “Solar Breath (Northern Karyatids)” presented next door to Charles Stankievech’s equally beguiling “”Loveland.” Snow’s naturalistic flap of a modest curtain against a screen sits in one tiny chamber, and Stankievech’s, a gorgeous cloud of purple smoke curling through an arctic landscape, in the next. But the pairing is shoved in a side chamber off the main corridor that’s so missable that, when I was there, too many did, to say nothing of the claustrophic labyrinth the pairing formed.

In this way, Oh, Canada may in fact represent too much of a good thing, with important works by artists like Sarah Anne Johnson or Terrance Houle relegated to the hallway, or David Hoffos’s immersive “Scenes from the House Dream” reduced to three small quotations in a closet-sized space that gave little or no sense of his remarkable vision. But it’s a little too Canadian to complain. Instead, I prefer to embrace what Markonish has done, which is start a brand-new conversation about things we’d long since taken for granted. Oh, Canada isn’t the final word; it’s just the beginning.

"Oh, Canada" is on at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, through

April 1, 2013.