There was nothing staid or static about Korean-Canadian artist Insoon Ha’s exhibition launch at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on Saturday (November 14). Ha’s show called Drain has gone up in MOCCA’s project room in tandem with a retrospective show by Montreal visual artist John Heward. About 40 people were on hand Saturday afternoon as Ha staged a performance piece in which she smeared a blank wall with chocolate before licking a series of words into the impromptu canvas. The words quickly bled back into the chocolate ground but the audience stood quitely mesmerized as the artist spelled out the words TASTE, PANT, OBEY with her tongue (see below). Chocolate dripped onto a three-dimensional tongue afixed at the bottom of the wall; Ha ended her performance by licking the tongue clean.
Inside MOCCA’s project room, drain held spectators spellbound. Dimmly-lit installations are both puzzling and disturbing; sculptures mix human and animal parts with allusions to violence. In her artistic statement Ha writes: “Depending on the situation and the environment, the roles of victim and victimizer are easily reversed. I choose to display two worlds in one location so that viewer is confronted with this stark, incongruous reality. Colonization causes a confusion of identity; identity becomes a space that is unfilled, a wound that is incurable. Post-colonialism caused old pain to resurface, but did not fully assuage that pain. The unexpected result is the illusion of utopian fantasy.”
MOCCA Artistic Director David Liss says, “This is Insoon’s first exhibition in Toronto and she lives here. She’s shown in Hamilton and at some very prestigious galleries in Buffalo, New York, including at the Albright Knox Art Museum. So it’s high time Torontonians got a look at the work of this fantastically interesting artist.”
WHERE/WHEN: John Heward: A Trajectory/A Collection and Insoon Ha: Drain at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (952 Queen Street West) until January 3, 2010.
NOTE: Special contemporary jazz concert featuring John Heward on Thursday, December 3, from 7 – 9 p.m.
Photos by Christopher Jones
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