Morley Shayuk

Horizon Lines

September 15 - 30

If film is religion for cinephiles, what to make of their cathedrals? 

Multi-disciplinary artist Morley Shayuk explores this question as theatres fill with movie buffs during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), shedding light on that very structure in which many of us experience movies: the suburban entertainment complex.  With his new installation Horizon Lines at Paul Petro Special Projects Space, Shayuk examines and appropriates the aesthetic core of the monolithic multiplex in search of greater meaning. 

In Horizon Lines, Shayuk continues his practice of gleaning detail from the suburban landscape for the purposes of spiritual and creative inquiry, paying special attention to the borderlands where nature meets civilization and dream meets reality. In these in-between places, magic can happen. And surely one such borderland within the contemporary landscape is the multiplex theatre, where people come to experience the magic of stepping outside themselves. Exuberant and outlandish, with frantic lights and spaceship shapes inside and out, the multiplex bursts from the North American horizon, a garish doorway into new worlds. 

Shayuk uses sculpture, video, and drawing to illuminate the place where movie and moviegoer meet:

• Sculpture   A distorted crucifix-like altarpiece anchors the installation. Made from plastered rectangular parts with painted recesses, the form and colours of the sculpture are inspired by the ceiling design of a Cineplex Odeon multiplex on Highway 7, just beyond Toronto’s city limits.

• Video   The Cineplex Odeon is also the subject of Shayuk’s video, in which architectural features of the multiplex become abstract, shifting panes of colour collaged into a crescendo of images. With the luminosity of stained glass and the gabled lines of a chapel, the images are tactile and recognizable but also mysterious and unspecific. The viewer feels that he or she has entered a hallowed and secret place.

• Drawing   Shayuk’s drawings incorporate and amplify designs in the carpeting and tilework of theatre interiors, as well as silhouettes of their exteriors. The geometric patterns draw parallels to tribal and spiritual imagery forced through a colonial lens.  

Through Shayuk’s playful yet unsettling abstractions, the multiplex emerges as a magical, even holy place on the contemporary landscape; as an exploded cathedral mirroring North American culture. Film devotees may never look at their places of worship in the same way again. 


Morley Shayuk is self-taught. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada.