New Art Exhibition: Lost Cat by the Wilson Family

The Wilson Family is a guerrilla art collective based out of Prentice Drive in Toronto whose exhibitions across the city are garnering much attention from the establishment. Their previous works include the much-lauded Garage Sale on Saturday exhibition and the limited edition piece entitled Please Do Not Park Here. Their latest work, Lost Cat, is their most ambitious yet.

Lost Cat takes the same form as the Wilsons’ previous projects: 8 x 11 inch paper in the portrait orientation, stapled to various telegraph poles and fences around the Prentice Drive area. Fans of the Wilsons are encouraged to seek out the artworks in a four-block radius of the Wilson abode, as there are four different posters, each of which appears to have been duplicated and displayed at least fifteen times.

The subject matter of Lost Cat differs from Garage Sale and Please Do Not Park Here. Whereas the previous two were scathing commentaries on capitalism, property ownership and personal space, Lost Cat is a poignant paean to loss and regret.

The first artwork that I found was delicately stapled to a wooden telegraph pole. At the top of the work was the title, “Lost Cat”, and underneath it was a black and white photograph of an adult tabby. At the bottom of the paper was information on the cat’s name, age and a number to call if we, the viewers, see this feline. The other three posters in the series all conveyed similar information, with slightly different wording and pictures.

The first thing to strike me about this artwork is that it truly captures the sadness and disappointment that comes with loss. Here, the loss of something precious has been conveyed through a beloved family pet, but the artists could so easily be talking about the death of a relative, the theft of an heirloom or the pain of a love gone astray. When the thing can no longer be found, and when it is something that is not responsible for its own non-being, then we are forced to try and find it ourselves, and here the exhibition evokes a new emotion: futility.

The more posters that one sees displayed in this exhibition, the more one feels the sense of desperation and ultimate failure that the Wilsons are trying to convey. The wording of the posters, with their plaintive ‘please’ and ‘reward offered’, also creates tenderness, false hope and a sense of impending mourning.

The pictures of the cat are a wonderful masterstroke. He looks for all the world like a regular household pet, lounging in that way that cats are wont to do, ostensibly in better times, when he wasn’t ‘missing’. The viewer is brought in by this added layer of interaction, our mind’s eye can picture this poor, lost feline trying to find its way around the city, not knowing where its favourite blanket is. Extend this mental picture to a vision of a deceased loved one or forgotten romance, and it become all the more sad; we see the cat as a representation of our doomed affairs, and it becomes clear that we will never again have that innocent love.

I also love the placing of the artworks. Each is held up by a single staple, showing an almost tactile fragility that could allow it to be blown away in a strong wind. The breeze creates a movement within the pieces that bring us closer to them. This movement and fragility also shows us how fleeting our relationships are; how quickly they can be taken from us.

I would certainly recommend that anyone in the Prentice Drive area check out this exhibition, which is running until all the posters are covered by ads for roofing companies, or until Ruffles is found, whichever comes first.

Admission to the Lost Cat exhibition is free. If you have any information about the whereabouts of Ruffles, please call the Wilson family on 416-555-5055.

Art Review: House

New works of art are popping up all over the place, from the guerrilla public artwork of the ‘Naughty Spraycan’ Collective to the 150 different statues of dung by 150 different artists, commissioned by the London Arts Council. Tourists and residents alike are finding dung all over the city, and the authorities say it has increased visits to London by 15%.

Toronto art group The Donovan Family have recently completed their new masterpiece, House. This beautifully satirical work replicates an average suburban home in a normal street, complete with car in the driveway, dog in the yard and furniture, paintings on the walls and household cleaning products in the cabinets. The Donovan Family themselves are part of the installation, living in the artwork as if it were their own home.

I visited House on a quiet Saturday afternoon. ‘Mr Donovan’, the group’s patriarch, feigned confusion as to the reason behind my presence at his ‘home’, a touch I found both unsettling and brilliant. It truly evoked the sense of the art experience as a voyeuristic one, as if I was an interloper, spying on the act of creation. Similar responses from ‘Mrs Donovan’ and the group’s two child members, ‘Susie’ and ‘Tommy’, underlined this feeling.

The interior of House is just like any other homestead in any city; in a way, its function is as the archetypal house, the Platonic ideal of the mythic, perfect, idea of a ‘House-as-concept’. Cheap watercolours line the staircase wall, a scathingly brutal comment on the state of the commodification of artistic sentiment. On the other hand, photographic portraits on the living room show the Donovan Family at different points in time – the two parents as young lovers, the family unit at a point when the ‘children’ were young, recent holiday pictures, etc. This timeline of human existence reflects the house (the concept of house) as an object within time, not separate from it. And yet, the appearance of both a calendar and wall-mounted clock in this room root the house in a definite temporal location. This paradox left me both breathless and a little gassy.

The attention to detail in this work of art is awe-inspiring. As I walked around House I looked inside drawers, under beds and behind furniture. Everything was as it would have been, if this was a home owned by the mythical ‘normal’ middle-class family. The drawer beneath the cutlery drawer contains miscellaneous kitchen items such as spatulas and egg-slicers. The space beneath the bed contains dust bunnies and old jigsaw puzzles. There was a mousetrap behind the sofa. And as I found all these little details I still had the four ‘residents’ of the house shouting at me to leave, acting it up for their audience of one. This really gave me the sensation of the artist (or in this case, artists) as reluctant creator, as someone who feels compelled to create without necessarily wanting to create.

After a thorough examination of The Donovans’ House, I felt compelled to leave. Possibly this was due to my growing awkwardness at the feeling of imposition the artwork gave me. Or it could have been because ‘Mister Donovan’ had just pretended to call the police and have me forcibly removed. But either way, I left with a definite sense of aesthetic pleasure. House is a wonderful - and highly recommended – installation that I would implore everyone to see.

House is running for an indefinite period of time at 236 Davidson Avenue, Toronto (two blocks north of Westinghouse and Blanchard). It is free to enter and open 24 hours a day, so long as the Donovan family let you in.