OTTAWA CITIZEN ART REVIEW: CRAIG LEONARD IS MESSING WITH YOUR MIND
Updated: March 3, 2015
Visitors are uncertain whether to step onto Craig Leonard’s installation, titled Shaken Antlers, at Central Art Garage in Ottawa. (Photo courtesy Danny Hussey, Central Art Garage)
A few years ago, I took a young nephew to the National Gallery and we were standing next to Court — the artist Brian Jungen’s basketball court made of sweat-shop sewing machine tables — when my overly exuberant nephew hopped up onto the court’s surface. A security guard ordered him down, and rightly so, for it’s a golden rule of galleries that you do not step on the art.
The problem for Craig Leonard isn’t that people will step on his installation of art at Central Art Garage in Ottawa, it’s that people won’t step on it, because they’ve been trained to not do so. When apparently allowed to do otherwise, people become uncertain and conflicted with their own common sense — which is precisely where Leonard wants them to be.
I can testify to the effectiveness of Leonard’s mind-messing installation, for I have I tromped all over it with my wet winter boots. I may have spilled a drop of wine on it, but who cares? Everyone who steps or spills on Leonard’s installation contributes to the finished piece — a state it will achieve only when the show closes on March 20.
Leonard is a quirkily conceptual artist based in Nova Scotia. His work was included in the celebrated exhibition Oh, Canada in Massachusetts. He’s an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where the website offers a crazily eccentric list of his recent work, including, “handmade records for the Los Angeles punk band the Screamers, a collaborative project with the Maritime History Archive on Newfoundland’s resettlement program, an examination of the Cuban Independent Library Movement, and a bookwork consisting of obsolete concepts from the Oxford English Dictionary.” Typically, even a description of Leonard’s work prompts a sense of befuddlement.
The earliest taste of Leonard’s that I’ve encountered is a small ad he put into a Toronto newspaper in 2003, which made the curious offer, “Artist to re-arrange your furniture. Free of charge. Call Craig. . .” Most responses were incredulous, Leonard says, as readers couldn’t figure out whether it was a real offer. (It was, though his real goal was to rearrange not furniture, but the viewers’ perceptions.)
Fast-forward 12 years to the recent opening of Shaken Antlers, his installation in Ottawa. (Don’t ask about the title, he’s not telling.) Central Art Garage is a small space, part gallery and part framing shop, and Leonard’s piece is a low stage, covered with 24 cork mats, that stretches clear from one wall to the other. If you want to enter the main part of the shop and you’re not a world-class long jumper, you cannot avoid the decision of whether to step on the art, and nobody is there to tell you right thing to do.
“I am interested in subtly making the familiar strange so there is a point of entry, but no reliable resolution,” Leonard tells me. “The creation of defamiliarized experience, then, means the possibility of the creation of new origins. Herein, for me, is art’s political function.”
When & where: to March 20 at Central Art Garage, 66B Lebreton St. North
Craig Leonard Exhibition ’Shaken Antlers’