The Art Museum\u2019s glassy entrance amplified the faux-corporate address of new media artist Jeremy Bailey\u2019s initiatory Whitesimple <\/em>(2022), whose wall-mounted tablets enjoined visitors to check their privilege at the door as part of a tongue-in-cheek exercise in pay-per-view race relations. Having undergone this ritual of purification, visitors were confronted with the symbolic threshold of Robert Morris\u2019s Portal <\/em>(1964), its white-latex-coated aluminum frame reflexively foregrounding their embodied relationship with the gallery space. In Hampton and O\u2019Brien Davis\u2019s incisive recontextualization, Morris\u2019s minimalist architectonics also drew attention to the freighted meanings of the putatively neutral \u201cwhite cube.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Extending this interrogation of art\u2019s socio-cultural contexts, Deanna Bowen\u2019s White Man\u2019s Burden <\/em>(2022) immersed viewers in a disquieting montage of archival materials constellating the founding figures of Canadian cultural identity, the institutions hosting Conceptions of White<\/em>, and a network of white supremacist and anti-Indigenous ideologies and organizations. Anti-foundationalist grace notes such as Mich\u00e8le Lalonde\u2019s Speak White <\/em>(1968), a powerful rebuttal to Anglo-Canadian nationalists\u2019 habitual conflation of whiteness and the English language, deftly undercut the essentializing logic of racial taxonomies. Jennifer Chan\u2019s Aryan Recognition Tool <\/em>(2022) carried this anti-categorical impetus to an absurd extreme by employing facial recognition and machine learning to facetiously quantify viewers\u2019 \u201cAryanness\u201d relative to a databank of historical Nazi portraits. Chan\u2019s mock-scientism served a serious purpose by exploding the racial classifications embedded in contemporary algorithmic vision systems and exposing their dark origins. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A more oblique satire of classification and control, Ryan Kuo\u2019s File: A Primer <\/em>(2018) gestures toward similar concerns through a parody of digital file-management protocols. Although contemporary formations of white identity occupied the foreground of Hampton and O\u2019Brien Davis\u2019s investigations, the longevity of Classical archetypes defined a charged historical horizon. An important fulcrum of the exhibition was the curators\u2019 pointed juxtaposition of a 3D-printed replica of Hiram Powers\u2019s Model of the Greek Slave <\/em>(1843)\u200a\u2014\u200aan improbable icon of abolitionist -politics depicting a white woman in chains\u200a\u2014\u200awith Ken Gonzales-Day\u2019s The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park, CA. 1935) <\/em>(2006\u200a\u2013\u200a\u200a22), an altered photograph of a lynching whose atypically white victims have been digitally edited out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a room adjoining this provocative historical-contemporary pairing, Fred Wilson\u2019s Love and Loss in the Milky Way <\/em>(2005) placed Greco-Roman statuary in anxious proximity with representations of African Americans, including a found \u201cMammy\u201d cookie jar. A microcosm of the exhibition\u2019s challenge to racialized genealogies, Nell Painter\u2019s Ancient Hair<\/em> (2019) scrutinized the Greco-Roman pedigrees invoked by white supremacists through a ludicrous art-historical survey of\u200a\u2014\u200anotably frizzy\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cClassical\u201d locks, from the Apollo Belvedere <\/em>through portraits of Goethe and the founding father of art history itself, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Hampton and O\u2019Brien Davis succeeded in bringing moments of levity to some of the most troubling subject matter of our time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a PhD from the University of Toronto earned in 2016, Adam Lauder has taught courses on Canadian art at OCAD University and the University of Toronto. In 2018, he organized an exhibition of Rita Letendre\u2019s public art at YYZ Artists\u2019 Outlet.<\/p>\n![\"ConceptionpfWhite\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CR_Lauder_ConceptionpfWhite_Untitled-132.jpg\")
White Man\u2019s Burden<\/em>, installation view, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2023.
Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"ConceptionpfWhite\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CR_Lauder_ConceptionpfWhite_HAF2923.jpg\")
Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n