K. Dain @ Peak Gallery

Kathryn Dain, Lyn Carter

 Dariusz Krzeminski, Kathryn Dain

Kathryn Dain & Ping Qiu - Germany

Gary Michael Dault, Kathryn Dain,  Ulisses Castellanos

Dan Brault, Kathryn Dain

CANADIANA AT THE PEAK GALLERY

December 10 - January 23, 2010 

Globe and Mail January 02, 2010

Gary Michael Dault 

This amiable group show, Canadiana, subtitled The Essence of the Canadian Landscape, is by seven Peak Gallery artists. Another group of seven.

The press release for the exhibition provides specs about the Canadian landscape taken from a Government of Canada website (http://www.goingtocanada.gc.ca), with handy factoids such as "the total land area of Canada is 9,984,670 square kilometres." Who knew?

After that sort of National Geographic beginning, it's every member of Peak's group of seven for himself/herself.

And there is much here that is diverting. It's great to see one of the late Juan Geuer's typographical musings on white mylar again, and Kathryn Dain's 300-square-foot presentation of punctuating bits of wood affixed to a wall, called Migration. The two pieces sort of hold the show together.

Chief among the attractions, however, are two works by the gifted Lauren Hall - an empty, wall-mounted, stylized, frame-like outline of a mountain range (Reflection of the Motherlode of All Gold) and a wonky, freestanding "mountain" of polystyrene and aluminum coated with bubble wrap (The Limits of All Known Ice 4), the wittiest, most abject riff I've ever seen on a picturesque, Lawren Harris-like mountain peak.