Please join us for the grand reopening of Leroy’s as we celebrate Steve Kado’s mini-retrospective “Me!” (aka Self-Condemned, Life is Fleeting and “From Toronto”).
The exhibition features a nearly comprehensive collection of ten years of Talking, Lamps, Carts and Tarps. A catalogue will be released at the exhibition’s closing on January 1, 2022.
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No one’s an ornithologist [...]
No one’s even a keen birder [...]
Self-selecting [...]
I know that’s displacing air
But it’s mute [...]
Favorite kind of press releases – straight forward or Nothing to do with the topic.
- Steve Kado
I’ve been staying in a gallerist friend’s aviary these days, and yesterday, Steve Kado asked me to write a press release for his retrospective at Leroy’s. I told him I would, but only if he’d talk to me from my bird- cage so that I could get juiced up. I’ve known Kado for some time – we met one afternoon in Portland, OR, and went together with a group of people to watch a World Cup game, I think (soccer definitely), and drink beer. Steve and I got along because we had things in common. People like people who remind them of themselves and Steve was like me, but with clearer skin. We both liked talking. Not just talking, but talking in and out of form, talking as substrate, and Steve was a newfound and luminescent conversationalist for me. He readily accessed the mots justes and obscure histories that day.
The way Steve Kado talks about his preference for colors that are generous in tinge and environments that are doofus-friendly gives context to some of the artworks in this ten year retrospective. Tarps, printed with banal, medium-format photographs of pretty landscapes taken by Kado, then tossed over any old gallery garbage, are described as “fart joke” art. This fart joke is not only sensually satisfying but raises questions around photography, trash, and civilization. Some civilizations preserve swaths of landscape to compensate for turning the rest of the land into a toilet bowl. For the Ainu people of Japan, a magical window that outsiders are forbidden to look into is the entry point for household gods and magical items. In other civilizations, a windowsill’s debris can suggest so much and yet mean very little. In some cultures, artists like Kado can take a stab at realism by printing sunsets on plastic, or by placing loose change on a ledge, or by hand bending replicas of a coveted lamp from the FLOS design catalogue. His love and irreverence for the psychology-infused, melancholic interiors of Hammershøi or Marc Camille Chaimowisz is coarsely reflected in the lurid powder coat he shoots onto his bootleg lamps.
Piped into the interior of Kado’s retrospective is a broadcast of hours and hours of Kado talking. Since the mid-aughts, Kado has talked, and has continuously found new ways of doing so: thoroughly script- ed, improvised, as part of a larger work, as a self-contained sound piece, as the soundtrack to a video, alongside the visual aid of a light or slide show. Kado has talked. And tonight, while he was talking to me about his talking practice, there was suddenly the splintering sound of a metallic powder coat shattering. The high-design lamp beside me in the aviary had mysteriously and spontaneously cracked open. I show Steve and he talks: “The lamp committed suicide. Every FLOS lamp autodestructs at the mention of a falsified FLOS lamp”. And then I asked Steve to flip the camera on his phone to show me the interior of his apartment: some laundry hanging, a few discarded dishes, some Telemann sheet music, and a lacquered, bright yellow handmade speaker.
— Nour P. Mobarak
Steve Kado is an artist, clarinetist, writer and keen recreational cyclist born in North York, Ontario, Cana- da. Things of his have been shown at places like metro pcs, Tate Britain, Castillo/Corrales, AGO, MOCA, Mercer Union, 8-11 and YEARS. He was in a band that recorded one of the last Peel sessions but never got to meet John Peel. He would like to thank you for coming to see this show.
Poster by Apogee Graphics
