Walking into The Dazzle exhibition, at Narwal Art Projects in Toronto, is like entering the private museum of some forgotten masonic lodge. It’s an unsettling and wondrous experience which invites you to wander and examine the collection of artifacts from over 30 contributing artists.
It’s easy to forget that you’re visiting a downtown art gallery while surrounded by taxidermied baby albino unicorn goats, aged oil portraits of masked dignitaries, occult emblems, exquisite mineral formations, scenes of pagan rites, jewelery, Jesus snatching squirrels, bones, and knitted cacti.
Described as “a study and celebration of collection fetishism”, The Dazzle raises questions about the impulse to seek out the strange and unknown, to catalog and collect artifacts from the fringes of the known world.
All works shown here are copyright of the originating artists.