Kristi Chen, Chiedza Pasipanodya, Alison Postma, Sriwhana Spong, Charlott Weise
August 23, 2023 - September 30, 2023
****.5
“How to Cook A Wolf” derives its title from M.F.K. Fisher’s wartime cookbook of the same name, published in 1942 at the height of WWII food shortages. The titular wolf is, of course, the one at the door—an embodiment of the wild, feral hunger and desperation that the global instabilities of WWII lured onto Fisher’s doorstep. “You must do with the resources you have to keep the wolf from snuffling through the keyhole,” she writes. Fisher’s book is less of a Hello Fresh-esque, stepwise guide to meal-making than a rigorous document of determination, of grace under distress, a means towards some seizing of survival. Sludge, the book teaches, can be made delicious by frying it in slices. It is a moral imperative to savour each bite. Nourishment—”with all possible skill, delicacy and ever-increasing enjoyment”—allows us to “assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains.”
Fisher’s existential opines on survival resurfaced again in 2020, during COVID-19 lockdowns. Her austerity and wry humour, written from her era of bleakness and fear, were apt in also assuaging the anxieties of a similarly inauspicious, totalizing global crisis. In 2023, nestled in a city facing ever-increasing inflation, a broadening gap between minimum and livable wages, and a shrinking of resources available to combat the forces making a head of iceberg lettuce cost $3.49, “How To Cook A Wolf”, the inaugural exhibition at two seven two, posits nourishment as a sensorial and embodied experience not entirely separate from our primal need for sustenance and physical satiation. This group exhibition, which features pieces from five artists (Kristi Chen, Chiedza Pasipanodya, Alison Postma, Sriwhana Spong, Charlott Weise), weaves together works of disparate practices, textures, and visions towards a unified imaginative experience that considers art more broadly as a means of satiety.
From the window hangs the first of many works in this exhibition from Charlott Weise: Birth of an Icon, 2021, a 78” x 32” canvas work depicting Madonna, the pop icon, chauffeuring the holy Madonna, the saint, through time and space. The passenger Madonna’s child, still in utero, asks via speech balloon: “kannst au bitte langsamer fahren (Can you please drive slower)?” A cheeky choice to commemorate the birth of this young Toronto gallery (I think MFK Fisher would enjoy), Birth of an Icon, 2021 is joined by 3 equally long, slender canvas pieces, hung in the atrium, whose size and shape evoke a vertical banner, or full-length mirror. These works (Breakfast at Mary’s, 2021, Driver’s Seat, 2021, Masc’uerade, 2021) are soft, textural pieces whose bright, washed colours and rounded, fine line illustrations collectively prime the viewer for a dreamlike excursion. Their wall-less, free-hanging presentations (you can, as I did, walk between and behind them) allow the pieces to take on multiple angles of viewing—this before-and-behind of each work calls to mind the conscious and subconscious, and as they sway suspended in the shifting daylight, allow for moments of superimposition, like brief moments of clarity.
Weise is an effective gateway into the show, and her work in some ways anchors it, making up 8 of the 14 available works on display. Beyond these textile carriers, the sculptural works begin to take hold. In the passageway sits one of three pieces from Kristi Chen’s work, Baskets Blighted, 2021—a rattan reed basket, handmade using traditional basketry methods from Chen’s father’s hometown in the Fujian province, charred at its neck with incense. The aroma—”cinnamon common to Wuyi Rock Oolong Tea cultivated in her ancestral lands”—is another solicitation of a sensory experience, enticing smell and, by extension, taste and memory. It is a fitting inclusion that grounds this juncture; it’s impossible to consider the nourishing experience without taking on the decaying one—loss is a type of hunger, too.
In the atrium, a small enclave, and the passageway are three pieces by Chiedza Pasipanodya: Vimbiso (Promise), 2022, Chibereko (Womb 1), 2023, and Chibereko (Womb 2), 2023, respectively. I missed the first piece during my visit, but I was able to find it online—a 50 lbs Zimbabwean Nyanga serpentine stone carving of baobab fruit, “an everyday object found in rural Zimbabwe”. The accompanying pieces use a similar motif of emblemized fruit, suspending raku and saggar-fired fruit ceramics on nets of sisal rope. The fruits themselves are blackened and appear in multiples, their full weight pressing down on the net, which is composed of layers of hundreds of handmade knots. These pieces are captivating, temporal pieces, examples of how nourishment and living are a tandem process. The light playfulness of the Weise pieces are given a counterpoint by these—the heft of the stone and ceramics, the rough tactility of the sisal rope, and the weighted tension of the pieces stand in direct contrast to Weise’s light free flowing banners.
Finally, in the main gallery are the paired works of Sriwhana Spong and Alison Postma, who is my friend. Spong’s is an 8 minute and 11 second video installation, commissioned for the 17th Istanbul Biennial, which was heavily delayed in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of these disruptions, the Biennial was reportedly keen on rendering an image of a vibrant, optimistic world—one that many have been desperate to imagine. In This Tree is Mine!, 2022, Spong displays frenetic images of red: hand-painted brushstrokes resembling bleeding blood vessels that resemble plant roots. To accompany these visuals are field recordings—the sounds of ants, a creaking tree, an advancing storm. A voice-over reads out the dreaming experiences of the artist and two women important to Sufi mysticism in the 8th and 9th centuries, Rābiʿa al-Adawiyya and Umm ʿAbdallah. In each woman’s dream, there is a large central tree. They are told it’s theirs:
A woman sees in the dark
trees that renew her—
A pear tree
A peach tree
A pistachio tree
A plum tree—
then in wakefulness
she sees
the same in her
While watching this installation, my friend turns to tell me about this book he received, as a gift, about the hidden world of trees. He says that if a tree senses danger—like, say, a new invasive species—it can, through various networks of roots and chemicals, communicate with the other trees in the forest. Together, they can work to mitigate the threat. I tell him they say forests are associated with the inner, imaginative life; but truthfully, I can only think of a woman I briefly loved, who adores trees. She would lay under a tree on a hot day for respite, and upon leaving she would rest her palm on the trunk of the tree and say, “thank you.”
Postma’s piece here, named Kissing Chair, 2022, is an elegant two-person chair in a curvy S-shape. Modelled after a Victorian conversation seat, it is intimate and snug, encouraging the whispers of romance or gossip. I sat here with my friend, and we talked, though not about love or rumours, but instead about the everyday monotony of our lives. He’s going to school and learning a lot about data. Can data be beautiful? Artful? In his spare time, he’s training to run a marathon. I’m less industrious, but not any less frantic, delaying my time by thinking about the next stages of my life. Did this chair—which sat us closer together than we had been in years, which creaked and groaned with my shifting weight, my leaning in and out, as if a third actor in this group conversation—play a part in all this, or make it more dignified? I’m not sure. But I felt nourished.
