Chicago, IL
Sometimes everything’s up and then everything’s down. Some days I swear I even feel sideways. At Erin Stump Projects in Toronto, Anna-Sophia Vukovich’s “Where is your/The Compass” provides visual aids for keeping track of emotional coordinates, your own and the world’s. In the center of the gallery, a steel structure modeled on a weather vane offers four bars on which to hang your choice of seven hand-painted signs, whose friendly geometric language will hopefully provide a visual symbol of the moods you are sensing. Life feeling too chaotic? Try the handful of red arrows scattered in every direction on an azure background. Loneliness lurking everywhere? That black circle suspended on a grey ground seems just right. Things looking up? The single black arrow rising on a slight tilt, that’s the one. Real weather vanes measure what’s happening in the air at any given moment, and I suppose Vukovich’s could too, depending on the sensitivity of its participants. But it could also be aspirational, marked by our hopes for how the wind might change. Way finding meets way seeking.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-15 6:23 PM