Artist Emmanuel Osahor has wrapped the clerestory at The Power Plant with a photographic wallpaper mural titled Sylvia’s Garden, Version II.Henry Chan/The Power Plant
Toronto artist Emmanuel Osahor makes beautiful paintings of beautiful gardens. One of them, now showing at the Power Plant gallery, features a pond surrounded by tall grasses and trees. It is titled Since There Are No Other Worlds. You could read that as a reflection on how nature allows us to anchor ourselves, achieving mindfulness in that moment sitting by the pond. Or you might prefer to read it as an environmental warning to treat this one inhabitable planet a whole lot better.
For its spring/summer program, the gallery pairs Osahor’s first major solo show in the city with long meditative films by veteran Toronto artist Shelagh Keeley that feature her rambles in foreign parks and gardens: It’s an unusual offering perched on a knife-edge between prettiness and politics.
Emmanuel Osahor’s Room for Two exposes the garden as a manufactured space waiting for human presence.The Power Plant
In a way, all landscape or nature art is now political, a cry for conservation. Osahor, a Nigerian immigrant who trained at the University of Alberta and the University of Guelph, found solace in nature during the pandemic, especially in a friend’s mature garden in Guelph, Ont. It is featured in Sylvia’s Garden, a magnificent painting of layered greens and browns, and also in Osahor’s solution for the tall narrow space of the Fleck Clerestory, that two-storey hallway that bifurcates the Power Plant. There he has wallpapered both sides of the space with a vinyl photographic wrap. The composition features differing (and not always consistent) viewpoints and focal lengths, and the viewer has no space to step back so the effect is both immersive and unsettling.
The other grand gesture, which expands on installation work Osahor did for a small exhibition at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2023, is less successful. This time, the artist, assisted by muralist Leone McComas, has covered all the walls of the main exhibition space with a blue painting intended to evoke a night garden. The effect of the mural is visually impressive but the Power Plant’s western gallery is just so huge, it seems difficult to achieve the intimacy of a garden and, while the walls represents night, the paintings that hang on them are all daytime scenes.
Since There Are No Other Worlds by Emmanuel Osahor is hung at the Power Plant against a mural of a night garden painted by the artist Leone McComas.The Power Plant
But what fabulous paintings they are. Osahor mainly uses oil and applies it with admirable sparseness and control while still achieving lush depth and painterly effects. Curator Adelina Vlas compares his work to the atmospheric landscapes and figure studies of the Scottish painter Peter Doig. Also, with his consciousness of historical precedent and quest for aesthetic experience, he follows on the heels of a previous generation of elegiac Canadian artists concerned with the past and beauty, recalling such work as Tony Scherman’s revival of encaustic painting, Tony Urquhart’s studies of French cemeteries or Jennifer Dickson’s garden photography.
There are never any people in Osahor’s gardens, just occasionally a chair, a bench or a bird bath, cumulatively creating a slight unease. In one, a pair of those standard aluminum-and-webbing lawn chairs sit waiting for occupants, flagging the way a garden is a manufactured environment. In that sense, the paintings are highly contemporary, evoking both an escape into nature and its impossibility.
Oshar’s work is paired with long meditative films by veteran Toronto artist Shelagh Keeley that feature her rambles in foreign parks and gardens.Courtesy the artist
Keeley moves through nature in a rather different way, using a camera as her body, eyes and ears as she explores foreign settings. The Power Plant is showcasing her film notebooks from 1985-2017, pairing the new with old. Until May 25 and again in August and September, it is screening Kyoto Notebook of 1985 and Jardin do Ultramar/The Colonial Garden, Lisbon, Portugal of 2016. Between May 28 and Aug. 24, it is screening Las Vegas Notebook of 1986 and Stuttgart Notebook of 2017.
As Keeley explains in notes for the show, Kyoto Notebook was filmed during a 1985 trip to Japan studying garden and temple architecture. She was given permission to shoot inside the grounds of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, famed for its traditional Japanese gardens. The 108-minute silent film includes long contemplative passages focused on the patterns of raked gravel and larger stones in the rock garden.
In her 2016 film Jardim do Ultramar/The Colonial Garden, Keeley uncovers the tropical garden’s dark history in Lisbon, Portugal.Shelagh Keeley/The Power Plant
If this seems anodyne, the more recent piece, Jardin do Ultramar, features a much more disturbing public site: the abandoned location of what was, in 1940, a human zoo featuring 138 inhabitants from seven overseas colonies brought together in Lisbon for the Portuguese World Exhibition during the dictatorship of António Salazar.
We learn this from explanatory material in a vitrine outside the screening galleries, which includes an original map and later critiques of this colonial spectacle. But on film Keeley discovers this history for herself as her camera reveals a tropical garden that was not well maintained but remained largely open to the public when she visited in 2016. As birds sing and palm fronds wave, the camera slowly discovers abandoned pavilions, padlocked gates and racist anthropological busts of the various peoples once represented.
In theory, the viewer might make the same slow but startling discovery of this odd history, without reading the explanatory material, lulled in by the lush setting but gradually realizing something was amiss. Or not. With colour, sound and digital imagery, the film’s effect is hypnotic and one could watch some passages of its 180-minute length without realizing there was a dark side to this pleasant if worn place. In the second program, Las Vegas Notebook explores casino architecture while Stuttgart Notebook visits a zoo and botanical garden.
These are seductive encounters with nature modified and manipulated; there is escape here for the viewer, but also, if you chose to dwell with them at any length, an implied judgment on the manipulation.
The Power Plant invites you into some very pretty gardens this spring, but do look out for the snakes!
Emmanuel Osahor: To dream of other places and Shelagh Keeley: Film Notebooks 1985-2017 are showing at the Power Plant gallery in Toronto to Sept. 14.
