The horror... The horror...

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Friday's creative offsite didn't go exactly as planned, but I will say it was an experience the team will never forget. Not without electroshock therapy, anyway.

Our original plan was to check out the Museum of Modern Art's Tim Burton exhibit before it left town, but half the department was too swamped to get away and if High School Musical taught us anything, it's that we're all in this together. Two weeks later, we had the free time and the people, but nothing for them to do. They'd just gone bowling in January and paintball was too polarizing, so we settled on Canada's leading contemporary art gallery. Creative offsite, right? We really did have the best intentions and, inevitably, hell is where they led us.

The main exhibit was Hirschhorn's Das Auge (The Eye), featuring several hundred atrocity photos. Dead children, mutilated corpses, faces torn apart by explosions or gunfire. It was like someone printed out rotten.com and stuck it on the walls, juxtaposed with paper mache eyes and toy seals splashed with fake blood. Still, if art is to be judged by impact, then give credit where it's due - it was the only thing we talked about as we fled to the bar ahead of schedule.

From the program:

The artist has written: "Das Auge does not see everything - but it sees everything that is red. Das Auge only sees the colour red. Thus is can only show red, it can only name red, and it can only 'be' red." Potent and overwhelming, Das Auge links perception and voyeurism with the politics of the body, all-seeing eye to all-too-fragile flesh.

-Graham

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