Gallery Guide: I_Wanna_See_You

It’s always interesting to see your city through an outsider’s eyes, and there’s an enjoyable opportunity to do so currently showing at YYZ Gallery.

Four Dutch artists recently came to Toronto, looked around the city, and developed a show based on their impressions (in collaboration with Toronto artists), somewhat awkwardly titled I_wanna_see_YOU_[Y.Y.Z.Ca_DE_overslag.nl]. They picked out aspects of our public space that were striking to them, but that a Torontonian might never notice, and have brought them to light in their installation.

Something that struck them was that Toronto is filled with relentlessly positive slogans, in the form of advertising copy and institutional mottos. “All for one”. “You’re richer than you think”. “Great minds for a great future”. They took photos of them around the city, projected them onto the gallery walls, and then filled in the projections in pencil, covering the gallery with overlapping positive phrases in nice fonts.

I had never really thought about this before, but when you see all these familiar slogans concentrated together, you realize just how heavily we’re subjected to these artificially positive exhortations. It’s not that far off from the hyper-positive slogans that covered billboards in old communist regimes (“Onwards to a better future”), with the difference that ours come from a myriad of different sources and are aimed at changing private consumer behaviour, rather than public citizen behaviour. Apparently slogans in European cities are not so ubiquitous, and do not have this kind of relentlessly peppy exhortation style.

Two of the artists then elaborated on other installations using these slogans. Rob Moonen filmed a video of Niagara Falls and runs a selection of the slogans over it. Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis, meanwhile, got a local person to stand at the (usually deserted) Speaker’s Corner at City Hall and read the slogans out to oblivious passers-by. The show includes a video of this exercise.

Robin van’t Haar, meanwhile, noticed an aspect of Torontonian behaviour that was new to the Dutch — walking with coffee. Apparently the Dutch, like other continental Europeans, drink their coffee where they buy it. But in Toronto, with our ever-busy lifestyle, we often buy our caffeine to go and drink it as we walk, saving precious minutes in our search for maximum time efficiency. van’t Haar captures this habit with a series of almost anthropological photographs — one of people walking down the street with their coffee in their right hand, another of coffee in left hands, and finally one of people resting their coffee on newspaper stands while they light a cigarette (the photo above).

This particular piece is part of a larger project he is working on called City Scripts, in which he “observes and records everyday behaviour of users of (semi) public spaces to offer people new perspectives on places they use day-by-day.” It includes series of photos of cyclists lifting their legs going through a puddle, people walking in a pedestrian mall with their hands in their pockets, and my favourite, people leaning on a short post waiting to cross at a pedestrian crosswalk.

I had never thought of either of either peppy slogans or walking-with-coffee as worthy of notice, despite seeing them constantly, and now suddenly I am thinking about what they mean to the city and to our way of living.

I_wanna_see_YOU_[Y.Y.Z.Ca_DE_overslag.nl] continues at YYZ Gallery (401 Richmond) until June 14.

Photo: Robin van’t Haar, Untitled, 2008. Image by Peter MacCallum