30 Artscene · FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2009 PHOTOS BY MICHAEL IVANIN / SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER FLIP SIDE: Micah Lexier's (left) exhibition Two Parents and Three Children and Vid Ingelevics' show hunter/gatherer are running concurrently at the two Oakville Galleries locations until Sept. 6. A tale of two artists at Oakville Galleries this summer By Murray Whyte TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE The title of Micah Lexier's new show, which opened at the Oakville Galleries' quite ridiculously lovely Gairlioch Gardens yesterday, is Two Parents and Three Children. For those who know the Toronto artist's work, this should fit as warmly as your grandfather's tatty old sweater. Lexier has long explored the particular intimacy of the family dynamic -- growing up and older, how we define ourselves over the arc of family life. Here, though, in the picture-perfect domesticity of Gairlioch's lakeside mansion gallery, he distills two decades of that work down to the very personal. The parents are his; the three children his brother, his sister and himself. "I don't think Micah would disagree that this show is a portrait of Micah," said Marnie Fleming, its curator. Lexier's portraiture is a form all its own, built on shared moments, words or experiences: Spare, hand-written scrawls, rendered in ink or steel; a selection of cards sent through the mail; a pair of faxes sent by his father. Lexier's work here contains more than a small dose of minimalism, and just as much intimacy and warmth. A painting from Lexier's recent (2007) Note to Self series, in his unmistakeable script, hangs in the dining room: "write dad a letter telling him you love him" (a letter, Lexier admits, never sent). In the living room, a cut steel piece from 2006's Lives + Works series, again in Lexier's hand: "Jilly, I love you," it reads -- or almost does. Jilly is Lexier's older sister; the phrase is still legible, but scribbled out. Another from Lives + Works, is a steel rendering of his father's sign-off to a letter: "great. love. dad." the piece reads, extraneous punctuation and all. Offhand, and maybe more sincere because of it, it sits adjacent to Lexier's Note to Self, about that letter never sent; the two distinct scripts, juxtaposed -- one's easy, casual expression of love, and the other's stillborn intent to return it -- is heart-rending, and conveys more about the two people than any likeness could. There's something elemental to the easy warmth of small gestures that we, for the most part, take for granted; Lexier brings them to the foreground, and opens a window onto both his family ties, and our own. At the galleries' second space downtown is Vid Inglevics' work, hunter/gatherer, a series of photographs taken in Canada and Switzerland. Some depict crude, precarious-seeming platforms cantilevered off the trunks of trees; others, various woodpiles, from the rough and messy (that would probably be Canada) to the meticulously architectural (a wild guess: the Swiss). There's death in every frame here, either pending or realized. Those platforms are for hunters to pick off passing wildlife (deer, mostly) from a vantage point that keeps their scent from reaching their quarry. One macabre image shows a platform in the foreground, clinging like a parasite to the trunk of a leafless tree; across an expanse of dead grass, another sits enshrouded in mist -- a makeshift shooters' alley. Stacks of wood speak for themselves -- especially in contrast with Gairlioch's other summer piece, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation; Metcalf has recorded the tree's life process, the gentle snap and gurgle of moisture traveling from roots up to branches and leaves; dangling under the canopy of an ancient beech are sets of headphones so you can listen in. It almost makes you wish the deer could shoot back. For information, visit Oakville Galleries' website at www.oakvillegalleries.com.