Dean Baldwin at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects review by Gary Michael Dault, Gallery Going, Globe and Mail, April 28, 2007 The installation sells for $18,000. Until May 12, 1086 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-537-8827 I sought out Dean Baldwin's exhibition, Attempt at an Inventory, because he announced in the gallery's press release that the work was "produced after an Oulipian text by French writer Georges Perec." I'd go to see any work generated from an idea of Perec's. You have to respect a writer who once composed a novel called A Void - a hefty book written entirely without the use of a single "e" (the so-called "Lipograms" composed by the radical Oulipian group of writers were works in which the writer excluded a letter of the alphabet). The Perec text Baldwin used, he says, was titled Attempt of an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-four. Pressing the Perec program into service, Baldwin proceeded to document, with his camera, more or less every meal he consumed during 2006. (He missed a few; when the camera batteries died, he says, or when his flash might have disturbed fellow moviegoers if he had tried to document a cinematic snack.) The result is a close-packed, edge-to-edge mosaic on the gallery wall of 1,342 five- by seven-inch colour photos of all those meals. It's an awful lot of food, and it looks both sumptuous and, seen all at once, gluttonous. I suppose that's sort of the point. A year's meals, gathered onto one wall and thus available, as Baldwin points out, at a single glance, offers "the nitty gritty essence of such consumption in all its indulgent habit and ritual, laid out in a buffet that is at once seductive and repulsive. Part of its seductiveness and its repulsiveness also lies in the fact that Baldwin is a pretty skillful photographer and, for the most part, the meals look rather too pretty, too art-directed. I suspect that Baldwin is something of an aesthete. Which is fine, except that it subtracts something essential from both the comic-obscenity of all that ingestion and the mock-bravado of its compounding: a sense - so powerful in Perec himself - of the sweet futility of existence. Perec's project was a sort of self-abjuration. Baldwin's, by contrast, is seriously close to prideful self-indulgence.