Daniel Borins: Jennifer Marman.

Sayej, Nadja

Daniel Borins

Jennifer Marman

Art Gallery of York University | Toronto, Canada

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The scenario presented in "Project for a New American Century," Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman's first pubic gallery solo (through March 29), is taken from a real-life torture device employed by anti-Franco anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, involving abstract- and surrealist-inspired "psychotechnic" colored cells. An installation combining architecture, painting and sculpture, the show's prison-like enclosure incriminates everything from formalist high art, utopian modernist buildings and, according to the Toronto duo, "the hollowing ideological clashes of the culture wars that have ensued since ... the twentieth century interwar period." Big talk is their trademark.

In one room, an 18-foot-tall plaster and concrete jail cell hovers broodingly on one wall. Peek inside (there's no door) and you find the cell splashed with abstract art. One interior wall has interlocking rectangles calling to mind a Sarah Morris or Peter Halley. A black wall with white stripes could belong to Frank Stella. A second room hosts four acrylic canvases that could very well be reproductions of a Ellsworth Kelly or Jack Bush. Up close, however, these canvases have clearly taken the jail in the next room as their still life subject. One canvas is a fragmented gray octagon, another takes a dizzying sidepiece of interlocking rectangles and paints them--with painstaking clarity--in more traditional hues of brown, orange and forest green.

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One could say that the two rooms are mirror images of one another, like two halves of a tangerine. In another light, they surgically open up a fatalistic dialogue between past and present--even bending time to suit their projections. Whether their work fuses Johannes Itten's color wheel with the Pink Floyd rainbow on the Dark Side of the Moon record cover, projects a slideshow of Sesame Street stripes onto an outdoor tri-vision billboard, or crafts a latter-day Pieta out of film props, trading Mary for E.T. and Jesus for Yoda, the pair seems precariously posed between the repetition compulsion of the culture industry and the internal return of the same.

But maybe they should phone home. What about colliding the recent works of Julie Mehretu or Laura Owens with a Rodney Graham? Or questioning the expiry date (or cooking time) stamped on the art of former times? Borins and Marman find clever ways to blame modernism for every imaginable cultural or artistic ill, though they might want to look around where they are rather than always back to the future. For despite where painting now stands--behind bars, that is--their constant urge to crank the prog rock and doodle freely still comes through, even if framed as obituary.