There’s a wall at GUM Gallery in Meaford, thirty feet long, split in half. On one side: a cartoon everyman who’s been failing gently since 1998. On the other: a traffic cone with opinions about safety it was never intended to have. Said out loud, it sounds like a pitch for a comic strip. Walk the length of it and something else happens.
Tanya Read’s Mr. Nobody isn’t a character invented for this occasion. He’s been around since 1998. He comes out of a specific lineage: the rubbery, doomed physical comedy of Depression-era cartoons, filtered through Chaplin and Keaton, and every Pierrot who ever took a pratfall for a laugh and got up a little sadder for it. Mr. Nobody has spent close to three decades failing at things, gently and repeatedly, in drawings and short films and sculpture, an everyman built less to succeed than to demonstrate, over and over, what it looks like when someone keeps trying anyway. That’s what saves him from being merely pathetic: he keeps trying. He is Sisyphus, not a punchline. Personally, I’ve always rooted for the Coyote over the Road Runner: the one who fails and gets up is more lovable to me than the one who glides through untouched. Mr. Nobody evokes that same loyalty. Even those blank cartoon eyes don’t read as empty to me. They read like they’re asking for help.
“Diminishing Returns” is installed as ten circular drawings running left to right along the wall, each one smaller than the last: sixteen inches at the start, down to something you could cover with one hand by the end. The row of images is followed by a sculpture: Mr. Nobody, crushed flat under a rock, the piece titled “Point of No Return.” The shrinking alone tells you where this is headed. What I didn’t catch right away is that it’s counting down too. Mr. Nobody looks out through a curtain of ribbons, and there are ten of them. A few images later he’s wearing a cape sewn with eyes, and there are eight. It took me embarrassingly long to notice that the drawings were doing arithmetic. Once I saw it, I went back to the start and found it running the whole length of the piece, quiet and exact, size and number both counting toward the same zero. I won’t itemize the whole sequence. Some of it is worth finding on your own. The combined installation rewards the kind of looking most gallery visits don’t always get.
Viz Saraby’s Cone starts from a simple job description: warn people about something physical, something that could actually hurt them. A hole in the road. Wet paint. Wait here, not there. But Cone, in Saraby’s hands, keeps walking past the edge of that job and into territory no orange plastic object was built to survey: emotional safety, the safety of not having to hear an uncomfortable idea, the whole sprawling modern architecture of protection-from-almost-anything. He’s a literal-minded creature loose in a metaphorical age, and the comedy comes from watching him take the metaphor as seriously as the original warning. If a society can decide an idea is too dangerous for a child, or a sentence is too dangerous for a reader, then somewhere there should be a cone for that too, and Cone, being Cone, goes looking for it. He doesn’t find safety. He finds its understudy. The edges he was built to warn people about have quietly moved to places he doesn’t quite understand.
Where Read’s wall is black and white, Saraby’s is a riot of color: seven street signs, printed on metal, official enough that you register them as signage before you register them as art. They read like Cone’s own handiwork, a set of safety signs reimagined from the inside by the one figure who’d actually care enough to redesign them. Two crosswalk figures shake hands while balanced on a beam, treaty-signing as tightrope act. A pair of schoolchildren cross the street with cones tucked under their arms instead of books: safety as the thing they’re being educated into, not just protected by. A directional sign sprouts arrows in every direction at once, growing like a tree that’s forgotten which way is forward. One sign, formatted exactly like a parking notice, just says SAFE, 9am–6pm, Monday through Sunday, as if safety were a metered zone with posted hours, available but not guaranteed after close. Below the signs, and behind a line of actual caution tape, sits a row of cones that have stopped doing the job the signs describe. They’re still cone-shaped, but each one has gone its own way: a teapot balanced on one, a wire hairdo on another, one wrapped head to base in rainbow color, a little parade of individuals who seem to have wandered off caution duty into something more like personality. The tape around them is the only thing in the room still doing traditional warning work, and it’s warning you away from a group of cones that, at this point, need protection from us while they’re busy becoming themselves.
Neither Read nor Saraby is really making a mascot. Both have done something closer to keeping a long diary in disguise, inventing a figure sturdy enough to carry the same handful of true, uncomfortable things across years and shows without the artist ever quite having to say them in the first person. Mr. Nobody gets to be sad in public for three decades; Cone gets to be confused about safety in a way an artist saying “I don’t understand what we’re all afraid of anymore” might not land the same way, said straight. The character is a kind of permission, a place to put a feeling and let it sit there long enough to become an argument instead of just a mood. That’s the strategy this show is built on, whether or not it says so out loud: two artists who found they could get closer to something true by first stepping a little 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
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