Nomads, a collection of art from Canada's west coast province of British Columbia, fulfilled its remit in the sense of being wholly and completely aimless. Though the show purported to be about the concept of wandering, few artists appeared to address this theme even tangentially (producing site-specific artwork in Italy which deals with mortality and transcendence is a bit of a cop-out). Gareth Moore was on course with an installation work based on his voyage through Canada. The artist chose works from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and juxtaposed them with dry and lifeless works of his own creation, i.e. a pair of glasses made out of wood pencils and bits of hair. It's an interesting idea but the piece turns into a self-indulgent quagmire of memory. And with little documentation of the actual voyage and how it relates to the NGC archive pieces, the viewer is left floundering with nothing to grab onto.

Though his work is also seemingly unrelated to the concept of nomadism, we were much more forgiving of Geoffrey Farmer's "The Surgeon and the Photographer" 2009 a motley crew of 366 deranged puppets (come to think of it when do puppets not look deranged?). The hand puppets mostly have sheathes of black and grey cloth for bodies, but their faces are culled from the pages of magazines, celebrities like Katherine Hepburn, or other figures made unrecognizable - wearing a Zoro mask of Ninja eyes, mouths clad in luscious black lips. Around this display table are two black clad figures, one hunched over some cardboard trays full of cut-out human features, (labeled "eyes", "noses" etc.), the other wears a puppet on his hand. These puppet masters shed light on the issue of the puppet as an inanimate yet fully animated character - made of paper and cloth yet enslaved by the humans which control their personalities. If we take it to a more psychological level we can see it as work that explores the duality between interior and exterior identities and the dueling forces of desires vs. public actions.

--Rebecca Catching

(*Images: Gareth Moore, Glasses for Going West (from Uncertain Pilgrimage),2006-07, Roe deer horn, artist’s hair, scrap wood, pencil, plastic pen, painted wooden shelf
© NGC

Gareth Moore, Untitled (from Uncertain Pilgrimage), 2006–09, Lightjet print, found wood frame, Collection of the artist
Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver

Geoffrey Farmer, puppet figure from The Surgeon and the Photographer, 2009, fabric, foun images, wood, metal stand.  Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.  Photo: Scott Massey

Geoffrey Farmer, The Surgeon and the Photographer, (detail), 2009,
2009, Fabric, found images, wood, metal stands Collection of the artist
© Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.)