Barbara McGill Balfour. (Reviews).

Open Studio, Toronto

The gallery at Open Studio is notable for the large scale of its double doors, which open onto a comparatively small, though beautifully proportioned exhibition space. While the site functioned previously as a garment manufacturer's showroom, today its doors swing wide to frame exhibitions that generally focus on print-based works.

Barbara McGill Balfour has worked with print media as an artist, teacher and master printer for many years, yet her recent exhibition, "Offspring," was by no means traditional with respect to printmaking. it did not invoke a discourse bounded by the medium's conventional terms of engagement: the edition, reproduceablity and the matrix, Instead (while still acknowledging some of those terms), "Offspring" conjured something of a one-person science fair, where the products of experimental investigation and the displays of evidence followed from a series of bouncily absurdist projects involving Silly Putty. The wry cultural procedures hinted at larger hidden truths and broader human preoccupations, which the rubbery stuff under scrutiny proved, surprisingly, capable of sustaining.

Passing through the doors that Balfour had, by implication, relieved of the capacity for framing artists' printmaking by mimicking procedures allied with the hard sciences, one encountered four kinds of objects. The wall to the left featured an undulating line of polished shelves on which rested proofs of experiments with lithographs, offset by hand onto Silly Putty - many bearing images concerning human reproduction that referenced biological research material and personal photographs. Ahead and to the right was a series of six screenprints whose diagrammatic character recalled the flowcharts that research scientists use to disseminate their findings at academic conferences. Here, the flow-charts served not as summations of data, but as haphazard webs of facts and apocrypha about Silly Putty. Rather than merely producing a sense of illogic, they advance opaque systems of thought whose determining structures are unavailable. Viewers are readily caught reading between the blobs and lines that variously inform them that "It was only after its success as a toy that practical uses were found for Silly Putty" and "Silly Putty is a self-help tool" and I don't bounce back the way I used to."

Continuing on a spin about the gallery (having been captured by the gestalt of this hopping laboratory), one encountered a small video monitor. Showing on it was an almost-convincing sphere of the pink stuff making an insistent trip about a virtual white room: from floor to wall and back, it describes a circuit that only a computer program could have concocted. The absence of naturalism about the action is slight enough to just momentarily perplex, yet sufficient to act metonymically to remind one that Silly Putty's likeness to bodily matter is close but, ultimately, all wrong.

The denouement to Balfour's almost-narrative exhibition of "evidence" (a piece located just inside the door to the left, but missable enough to assert its firstness last), was a large dollop of the real stuff - Silly Putty - perched high on the wall so that some of its scatological droppings lay pathetically on the floor below. This element was playful and gross and resonant. It was capable of reminding one that, while in science great discoveries often occur by accident, art sometimes extrudes itself slowly within the culture and, as in birthing and shitting, allows the unseen to finally be viewed.

Patrick Mahon is an artist and writer living in London, Ontario. His work will be shown this spring at Museum London and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.