The Leo Kamen Gallery is pleased to present its summer exhibition, Bad Dog, No Biscuit! which opens on Saturday, June 7, and runs until July 12. The gallery is closed from July 13 to August 12, after which the exhibition resumes through Saturday, September 6.

After last summer’s group exhibition, Walking the Dog Back Home, I wanted to put my feet up and relax this year, but no such luck. Artists are perennially inquisitive. They’re always digging around in the yard, snuffling at the fence posts, wagging their tails and wanting to play.

Mark Gomes started all the mischief this summer by cutting a circular hole in the wall for one of his sculptures. The Toronto skyline loomed into view on the other side. Not to be outdone, Anne Ramsden hung two photographs of blue potatoes — ordinary spuds never looked so unappealing. Susan Schelle’s large photograph of a cat curled up in clothing toyed with comfort. Sarah Stevenson’s tubular glass vessels filled with phantasmagoria certainly did not. Tim Sullivan’s “Dutch Boy,” poked his finger through the painting of a boat. Yam Lau etched a poet’s last words onto a glass bottle full of water. (The man had drowned in the Seine!) And what to make of Arthur Renwick’s contorted “Mask” portraits of Native Canadians?

Fortunately, Denis Farley, a new hound to the neighbourhood, tempered the shenanigans with his eloquently constructed photography, as did Kristina Kudryk with her painting of
a man on a beach who seems to be dissolving into a wistful summertime haze. This was where I should have been, not keeping an eye on David Craven’s latest jittery canvases. Disruptive, obstreperous, roguish — they were utterly in character with the rest of the show.