Duly enjoyed: Kelly Lycan @ TPW, Office as Medium @ XPACE

A couple of those all-caps galleries on Ossington have some quite enjoyable exhibitions going on right now.

Over at TPW, Kelly Lycan's "White Hot" offers a kind of minimalist mayhem, stockpiling objects that are white, clear or neutral in colour. Piles of doilies get thrown behind shelves, plastic bags are tucked between Flavin-esque wall elements and carved-out carpets are stacked up to spell the word "save." The overall meaning was elusive but to me there was something going on about the feeling of purity that can come with hoarding/shopping/accumulation of used or reused objects—even if you're not going to use them. Make sense? Dunno. But it's like soothing tapioca to September-opening stressed eyeballs.

Next door at XPACE, four artists decide to use the officey aspect of the gallery to the max, creating works from grey carpets, UHU sticks, and best of all from the artist-run-centre angle, old back issues of art magazines, for a show called "Office as Medium." Oh, the kinetic sculpture of the floor-skimming ceiling fan in the back is also particularly worth a look. Strangely, however, there were no post-it-note works in sight. Too cliche at this point? Or did someone preemptively steal them all might happen in a real office? Can't tell, but it looks like the artists had fun with this one, refashioning cube-dweller accessories to their own ends. Coffee-break-ariffic.

Image of office-y sculpture from Xpace