There’s a wall at GUM that is thirty feet long. For this show, it’s divided in half. On one side is a cartoon everyman who has been gently failing since 1998. On the other side is a traffic cone with opinions and questions about safety. At first glance, you might think it’s light-hearted comedy. Look closer, and something deeper appears.
Tanya Read’s Mr. Nobody isn’t a new character; he’s been around since 1998. He comes from a specific lineage: the rubbery, doomed, physical comedy of Depression-era cartoons, influenced by Chaplin and Keaton, and all the Pierrots who took a pratfall for laughs and got up a little sadder. Mr. Nobody has spent nearly three decades gently failing at things in drawings, short films, and sculpture. He is an everyman who demonstrates what it looks like when someone keeps trying despite setbacks. That’s what saves him from being simply pathetic: he keeps trying. He is Sisyphus, not a punchline. I’ve always rooted for the Coyote over the Road Runner. The one who fails and gets back up is more appealing to me than the one who glides through unscathed. Mr. Nobody inspires that same loyalty. His blank cartoon eyes don’t seem empty; they seem to be asking for compassion.
The installation “Diminishing Returns” features ten circular drawings running left to right along the wall, each one smaller than the last: starting at sixteen inches and going down to a size you could cover with one hand. The row of images is followed by a sculpture: Mr. Nobody, crushed flat under a rock. This last piece is titled “Point of No Return.” The shrinking picture diameters indicate the direction this is going. But what I didn’t catch right away is that each drawing is also counting down. Mr. Nobody looks out from behind a curtain of ribbons, ten in total. Two images later, he’s wearing a cape with eyes, and there are eight. It took me too long to notice the pattern. Once I did, I returned to the start and found it running the entire length of the piece, quietly and exactly, size and number both counting down to the same zero. I won’t list the whole sequence. It’s worth discovering on your own. Close attention will be rewarded.
Viz Saraby’s Cone originally had a simple job: to warn people about things that could actually hurt them such as a hole in the road, or wet paint. Go here, not there. But Cone, in Saraby’s hands, has gone beyond that job and into areas no orange plastic object was meant to explore: emotional safety, the safety of not having to confront uncomfortable ideas, the whole vast idea of protection from nearly anything. He’s a literal-minded creature in a metaphorical age, and the humor comes from watching him take the metaphor as seriously as his original job. If society can decide an idea is too dangerous for a child or a sentence is too risky for a reader, then there should be a cone for that too, and Cone, being Cone, steps up to protect. The edges he was built to warn about have quietly shifted to places he doesn’t quite understand.
While Read’s wall is black and white, Saraby’s is a burst of color: seven street signs printed on metal, official enough to register as street signage before you see them as art. They are perhaps Cone’s own creations, a set of safety signs reimagined by the one figure who would feel compelled to redesign them. Two crosswalk figures shake hands while balancing on a beam, treating the act like a tightrope walk. A pair of schoolchildren cross the street with cones under their arms instead of books: ‘safety’ as what they’re being educated to embrace, not just what they are shielded by. A directional sign sprouts arrows in every direction at once, like the branches of a tree. It has no firm opinion about which way is forward. Another sign, formatted like a parking notice, simply says SAFE, 9 am–6 pm, Monday through Sunday, as if safety were a timed zone, available but not guaranteed after hours. Below the signs, behind a line of actual caution tape, sits a row of cones that have broken away from their prescribed straight and narrow roles. They’re cones, but each has taken on its own character: a teapot is balanced on one, a wire hairstyle on another, one is wrapped in rainbow colors. They are like a parade of individuals who have wandered off from their warning duty and taken on individual identities. The tape around them is the only element still doing traditional warning work, keeping us away from cones that now need protection while they become themselves.
Neither Read nor Saraby is making a mascot. Both have created something more like a diary; crafting figures to express uncomfortable ideas without the artist having to say them in the first person. Mr. Nobody has been publicly failing for three decades; Cone grapples with safety in a way that an artist saying, “I don’t understand what we’re all afraid of anymore,” might not come across in the same way. The character provides a kind of permission, a means to express an idea and let it sit long enough to become more than just a mood. I think that’s the strategy behind this show: two artists who found they could get closer to something true by taking a step to the side of it.
Mikael Sandblom, July 2026
- Opening Saturday Aug 1st 12-2 (artist talk 12:30 – 1:30 pm),
- Exhibition: July 17 to September 1, 2026
- GUM Gallery, 46 Sykes St. N., Meaford, Ontario gumgallery.ca
Leave a Reply