Jeff Morton

I imagine that what I hear echoing off the walls of the white-cube gallery is the proceedings of a robot congress, a cacophonous, fevered debate on robot rights—and not a single little robot agrees with any other. I detect strains of barely recognizable melodies, guitar riffs, the squeals of pleading robots, and the bleeps and bloops of a video arcade.

 

Closer inspection reveals none of these to be transpiring. Stepped white plinths support a menagerie of plastic animals—horses, big cats, and a tyrannosaurus rex for good measure—in their depicted natural habitat, nestled amongst plastic ferns, trees, and shrubs. They’re frozen, as if they were going somewhere when someone pressed the pause button on reality. Oh, and they have electronic buttons on their backs—familiar red and black buttons that beg to be pushed, and when pushed, reward you with squeals and melodies.

 

Regina-based Jeff Morton’s hacked-toy installation All the Horses and All the Egg provides a framework for provoking gallery attendees to reconsider their relationships to toys, classical music, and the conductive copper traces inside their childhood toys.