Toronto
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
A palpable sense of unease pervaded Ydessa Hendeles’s “The Milliner’s Daughter,” at least initially. The installations in this decade-long survey broke down into three dimly lit spaces populated by various mannequins and four brighter spaces featuring mechanical toys, panels of illustrated texts, and assorted supplementary images. Lingering in the galleries, that first impression of unease began to erode before reasserting itself. Not only did the heartening impact of the mechanical toys wane dramatically, but deeper and darker associations also began to emerge. Drawing from assorted events and literary sources, as well as personal and family history, Hendeles combines diverse materials to create fables that call attention to treachery, power struggles, shifting values, forms of exclusion, and calamity. In …see the entire review in the print version of April’s Sculpture magazine.
