Hazel Meyer embraces the bodily theme.

AKA Gallery has its walls covered in organs that seem to string on endlessly throughout the room for its latest exhibit, Intestinal Anarchy! 

Coming from artist Hazel Meyer, the showing is taking the perspective of suffrage with it’s flayed organs. What’s most eye catching about the work from first entrance into the gallery space is the sheer scale of what Meyer has created.

Meyer hails from Toronto, where she acquired an Master of Fine Arts from Ontario College of Art and Design University. Her primary position as an artist is socially conscious with a focus on making environments that end up used as locations for performance, practice and athletic training. Therefore, her art makes the room itself a canvas on which she creates her piece.

Using a contrasting salmon pink background, Meyer has spread drawings of intestines and organs across the walls and all the way to the ceiling. They all separate and tie together to create a true feeling of lawlessness and anarchy, much like the title intends.

The art gives the impression of doodles with cut out text that mixes together to create work that feels seamless, disregarding any kind of structure typically seen in more classical gallery showings.

Part of the intent that Meyer is going for is structure within chaos and how constructed thoughts inform politics while the bodies that these thoughts and ideas come from are messes of intestines and fluids.

The organs and insides that scatter the walls of the AKA Gallery seem to be presenting the distinct parts that make a person whole, as there are individual displays of patterns that resemble the brain as well as the more intestinal side of the human anatomy.

Shirts hang from the roof holding the patterns of brains within triangles, resembling portions of what makes a person complete spread throughout the room.

What is most impressive about the work, beyond its scale, is the amount of detail that goes into each individual organ on the wall. They were clearly intricately created down to every last inch that spans the walls. Each organ is completely unique from the other, with some that are sparse and thin and others that are dense lush, almost like  a fleshy version of forestry.

A theme that is ever present throughout the gallery is a saturated feeling that surrounds the viewer with the art. Although the art is clearly of entrails, it has some wild feeling akin to trees that adds a natural element of beauty to the chaos.

It’s a polarizing experience to be inside a room coated by what is essentially your own insides, but amidst all the of the intensity there is a calming aspect to the works from the sheer mechanical skill put into their creation.

Intestinal Anarchy! is a show that draws parallels between human nature and the zig-zag assembly of  anatomy, allowing the viewer a glimpse inside themselves in both a figurative and literal, almost physical way.

Intestinal Anarchy! is running until Nov. 29 at AKA Gallery.

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Photo: Evan Salter