My first Luminato experience this year – or ever really as I was scarcely aware of the seminal arts fest until this year (my bad!) – was an installation from New York City-based artist Tony Oursler called Forty One – Five, a collection of three (though I only saw two because I couldn’t find the flippin’ Young Gallery) large multi-media pieces that were at once low-profile and difficult to ignore. Really, though, when I say "low-profile," I mean that two of them you wouldn’t see unless you actually went looking for them, which as per my understanding is not typical for displays of public art; but this is provocative, contemporary-interdisciplinary stuff we’re talking about here so you can go looking for it, son! On the other hand, the least discreet piece was placed in all of its frantic busyness right on Dundas Street in front of the AGO... I guess going off in all directions is what Luminato is all about.

When I say that they were difficult to ignore, this is because the pieces were gigantic, colorful and made a pretty ferocious racket. Essentially designed to look like transparent houses, these behemoths of glass, aluminum, electronics and household junk offer the viewer a look into the unseen fears, obsessions and compulsions of ordinary citizens and the simultaneous attraction and revulsion they display for their possessions and environments. Adorned with several televisions, Oursler, a man with an already formidable reputation for being extremely intense and shocking in his art, filmed a number of performers in continuous full-body shots alone in blank rooms, screaming paranoid epithets. Their actions within the barren soundstages are displayed on the screens in sharp juxtaposition to the cluttered spaces, suggesting a pointed alienation from their material surroundings, which in the case of the piece displayed in Grange Park, is filled with wall to wall junk. Furthermore, their fearful howling is cranked up to blissfully obnoxious levels through an elaborate sound system that utilizes each of its speakers to play the sound track in staggered time which makes for a chaotic cacophony of primal screaming and bouts of tragic self-loathing.

The result of this insanity is rather unsettling, but less so when you see the installation as much as when you think about it afterward. Oursler, who has completed installations in cities all over the globe and is noted for his unique blending of mediums and use of the human body in his work, here creates a collection that is viciously provocative, brutally sincere and psychologically and socially probing, the true power of which is not immediately clear. Forty One – Five is one of the more haunting features one would be likely to see at this year’s Luminato, a shockingly honest portrait of the secret life of everyone in their relation to their living spaces and it was just sitting there on the street naked for all to see.