![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/82-CR5-IMG1-IM_Morgan-Feir_18_eva_kotatkova_documentation_web.jpg\")
Detail, installation view, Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto, 2014.
Photo: courtesy of the artist and Art en valise<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
In Eva Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1\u2019s world the institutions have run wild. Schools and hospitals spill over and outward into nightmarish fragments and snippets. Despite being in familiar enough territory (psychiatric wards, systems of taxonomy, discipline), Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1 manages to reconfigure the material into forms that fascinate. Imagine the collected works of Michel Foucault made animate\u200a\u2014\u200athese systems are endlessly intriguing, especially when pulled apart and laid bare. Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1 shows that our institutions both structure and sustain us.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nTucked away in a quiet industrial area of Toronto, this exhibition marks the Czech artist\u2019s first showing in Canada. Somehow, this neighbourhood seems a more natural fit than the Gothic canals of Venice, where she exhibited during last year\u2019s biennale. Her monochromatic palette hits a little harder when surrounded by train tracks and auto-body shops. While the colour scheme remains constant, the exhibition has no allegiance to medium. Wearable sculptures stand across from collages, stacked images, varied ephemera, and a monumental table installation. Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1 pursues a feel, a terrain. Images alone offer recurring elements: birds, skeletal systems, organs, and cages surface throughout. They provide the bass line, the rhythm, to pull you in and lead you through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost all of these images appear within a collage that runs across the gallery\u2019s southern wall. Created for the exhibition, it calls to mind shadow boxes filled with the bizarre. Faces attached to globular, spine-shaped supports, school buildings, fragmented body parts, and figures (mostly children), all hanging from strings in marionette-fashion. The most interesting elements of the collage are the most minute: Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1\u2019s interventions into found images (pulled from both Canadian and Czech books). Atop bodies and shapes, she alternately draws or carves geometric structures that give even the most innocuous figures a pseudo-scientific edge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These etchings and excisions point to Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1\u2019s strength: the miniature and the multiple. The collages, replete with small, intricate details draw in and captivate much more thoroughly than her large-scale installations such as Educational Model: Construction for Sitting, Reading, Writing, Drawing, and Learning<\/em> (2009). Yet, Educational Model<\/em> does function well within the exhibition as a whole, as it offers a moment of respite and breathing room from the hordes of objects and details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout, Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1 knows her idols well. (And how couldn\u2019t she, with work so contingent on the academy?) There are hints of Hannah H\u00f6ch in the collages, and Franz Kafka in the bureaucratic absurdity. But there are instances when these references hew a little too close for comfort: cutout figures, for example, suspended in front of white paper sheets that capture the shadows immediately point to Christian Boltanski\u2019s shadow-based work. These shadowy figures may also point to the influence of Czech Black Light Theatre, but their execution seems too derivative. Excepting these moments, though, Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1 has created a world entirely her own.<\/p>\n