Despite the alias, Anser is perhaps one of Toronto’s not-so-secret graffiti artists. Over the years, you might have come across one of his signature “Mysterious Date” faces drawn on various graffiti-tagged and untagged surfaces across the city. The Crowded Kingdom exhibit at Dundas West’s #Hashtag Gallery demonstrates how recognized and admired his work has become in recent years. This is his first major exhibit in over six years and features new renditions of the Mysterious Date face.
COURTNEY HALLINK/THE VARSITY
The gallery is comfortable and brightly lit, and showcases two rooms of portraits done on a variety of mediums. The installations in the first room are the Mysterious Dates painted over hanging brickwork canvases and are amongst the largest works in Crowded Kingdom. They are the first pieces the visitor sees when they enter the gallery and are, perhaps, a nod to Anser’s beginnings as a graffiti and street artist.
The walls connecting the two rooms of the gallery both have clusters of Anser’s smaller pieces. The pieces here are done on glass, paper, and wood, and many are framed. They are placed closely together, and it is difficult to not be entirely captivated as your eye travels through the diverse colors and prints.
The Mysterious Date face has been through its own evolution. Anser’s previous exhibitions, like Funktion Gallery’s A Mysterious Date with Anser in 2009, show a series of portraits that are fundamentally graffiti-like in style. The lines are faster, fuzzier, less controlled; at the same time there’s a sense of raw personality that can be read in these faces. This style can be seen in much of his original street work.
The collection on display in Crowded Kingdom is more streamlined and uniform than Anser’s previous work. Anser compromises shading and detail in order to experiment with media, and increasingly use bold lines and colors. There is less variation of subject here; it feels as though you are looking at endless interpretations of the same mysterious face.
As well as the drawings and paintings at #Hashtag, there is a series of small, three-dimensional ceramic heads with the mysterious faces. These heads are a result of a collaboration with Big Trubble, a Toronto-based toy designer. There are 32 displayed together on one shelf, with black-and-white heads book-ending the colourfully translucent ones in between.
The right-side wall in the second room has nine mid-sized portraits on rectangular glass sheets. The faces are filled in and around loosely with watercolors, beautifully painted on the backside of the glass. The remaining wall in the room has a square white canvas that fills the space, and is filled itself with hundreds of outlines of the mysterious face.
At a glance, Anser’s work seems alien; many of his faces lack eyes or pronounced expression. Yet at no point is this feeling conveyed through Crowded Kingdom; it is surprisingly human, and effortlessly relatable. The viewer is immersed in the repetition of the mysterious face, and Anser’s numerous interpretations convey a vast range of emotion and thought. In a 2009 Torontoist interview, Anser expressed his wish to shrink the divide between graffiti and street art, and make the former more accessible for the average viewer. This is exactly what Crowded Kingdom achieves. If the collection’s nearly sold-out status is any indication, many visitors are more than ready to hang a mysterious face on their own wall.
