"Shangri-Lost: Jimmy Limit, Jessie Harris, Shawn Kuruneru"

LE
1183 Dundas St W
January 25–February 25

Jimmy Limit, Sarah Smoke, 2006, C-print, 16 x 20".

“Shangri-Lost” is a group show conceived by artist Shawn Kuruneru, who invited his pals Jimmy Limit and Jesse Harris to contribute their apocalyptic visions of today’s male youth to his own work. A skilled draftsman, Kuruneru created a collection of surrealistic drawings with ballpoint pen and black ink—common writing tools that he uses with a surprisingly featherlike touch: There are as many entwined animals (birds, deer, skunks) as there are references to art history (Velázquez, Nauman, Cornell) and pop culture (Grace Kelly and the bearded woman). Harris, instead of offering a new manifesto, printed cheeky slogans—such as NO FUTURA FOR YOU—with old wood blocks on colorful sheets, both dating from the '70s, the era just before his childhood. Limit, a photographer, expands his series "kill ur parnts," 2005–2007, which is truly a pleasure to view, despite the bleakness of the juvenile desperation in a Canadian suburb it depicts: beer-drinking parties, rituals with knives in the forest at the edge of town, and (premature) visits to the cemetery. While influenced by Wolfgang Tillmans’s early photographs and pin-board-like installations, Limit makes Tillmans’s work look like an editorial spread from Better Homes and Gardens. Kudos for hanging two editions of the very same photograph right next to each other. Youth today is not singular but a superfluous repetition of the same.

—Jennifer Allen

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