Adam David Brown: White Noise and other Bounties

With financial markets plunging around the world, it is perhaps a good time to consider economies of scarcity, which is what Toronto artist Adam David Brown serves up in his current solo show at MKG 127. The gallery’s press release makes reference to what it calls Brown’s interest “in silence, ephemerality and emptiness,” and he enacts it with panache in a series of works drawn, painted and otherwise made with Pink Pearl erasers. The gallery looks virtually empty through the outside window but the rubbery fragrance of the eraser and a wall-high rendering of the word “Shhh” fills the room, once inside. Applied directly to the wall through stencils, the letters usher in a mood of library-like restraint and rectitude that is matched in a series of small wall works, both framed and unframed. In the work titled White Noise a slanting pile of empty zeros, mounted inside a shadow-box frame, takes on a baroque-seeming plenitude that underscores the more in Brown’s less-is-more approach. (127 Ossington Ave, Toronto ON)