Placebo

At Artspeak until July 16

Placebo is a two-person show that takes on themes of production, consumption, and corporate branding, particularly as they relate to women. Helen Cho and Colleen Wolstenholme also riff on femininity, domesticity, and the politics of the body--gender issues familiar to postmodern discourse, yes, but still a long, long way from being resolved.

Cho, a Korean-Canadian artist currently living in Berlin, is represented by Too Sweet! Go Away!, a floor-level installation of soaps and sugar she first exhibited in 2000 and here adjusts to complement the gallery's interior architecture. Comprising some 75 bars of coloured and scented soap placed on little islands and low hills of granulated white sugar, Too Sweet! has the look of a fantasy diorama. It's an ephemeral, miniature landscape that evokes little-girl nursery rhymes of the "sugar and spice and everything nice" variety.

The installation both attracts and repels: the wafting fragrance that greets you as you walk through the door eventually becomes sickening, and the grating of escaped granules of sugar under your shoes sets your teeth on edge. The white colour of the refined sugar and the cleansing function of the soap both speak of a kind of erasure of nature and identity.

Cho has carefully and sensuously carved concavities into each bar of soap and adorned many of the resulting sculptures with beads, sequins, junk jewels, feathers, and fur. More disturbingly, she has placed a snippet of human hair into one of the little soap vessels, pierced others with razor blades, pins, and needles, and patched a few more with staples and thread--clues to a sinister agenda of violence and suffering embedded in all this decorative and fragrant sweetness. Cho is asking us to contend with cultural notions about what women are made of.

She also seems to be alluding to the vulnerability of the female body. The smooth surfaces, rounded shapes, and carved hollows of the soap sculptures evoke skin, flesh, and body cavities. More gruesomely, it's not possible to look at soap without remembering that it is often manufactured from the rendered fat of slaughtered animals. This knowledge gives Cho's installation a sacrificial aspect, one that all the sugar in the world cannot mitigate.

The labour-intensiveness that is a subtext in Cho's work is up-front and explicit in Wolstenholme's. An internationally exhibited artist, Wolstenholme is based in rural Nova Scotia. In her Artspeak project, enigmatically titled , they often tend to resemble plants, she combines women's traditional craft techniques with photographic and computer technologies. Her wall-mounted installation--an immense pseudo-quilt composed of thousands of tiny, altered, and montaged photos and corporate logos, laser-printed on hundreds of small triangular and five-sided pieces of paper, ironed onto fabric, and conjoined with quilting tape--grapples with the ways in which women's psyches are shaped by both gender stereotyping and consumerism, from prescription drugs and cigarettes to pornography and cake mixes.

The work's title is a fragment of a quote from the 12th-century Spanish-Arab philosopher, Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroíƒ «s), writing on the condition of women and their complete, identity-nullifying consignment to the tasks of "procreation, child-rearing and breast-feeding". By citing it here, Wolstenholme seems to conflate a critique of fundamentalist attitudes toward women (whether Christian, Judaic, or Islamic) with that of the role consumer culture and multinational corporations play in perpetuating traditional gender roles. The addition, here, of repeated images of naked women appropriated from erotic Victorian-era photographs further confuses our reading of the decorative, intricate, and often illegible arrangements of Nike swooshes, cigarette-logo camels, Betty Crocker cooking spoons, and little blue pills. The work is a bit overwhelming and underilluminating, its zillion tiny component images montaged into a huge, blandly coloured whole that ultimately doesn't tell us very much. Cho's soap and sugar more successfully engage our interest and our understanding.