This text  by ANA BARAJAS was published along side KEITH LANGERGRABER‘S You Can’t Go Home Again exhibition.

The science-fiction genre offers us a glimpse into other worlds that, because of the usage of science-based theories to explain their existence, seem entirely possible and true. Perhaps it is our collective disappointment with our immediate reality which encourages the construction of alternative visions that are more flexible and porous. It is in this parallel universe that Keith Langergraber grounds his installation You Can’t Go Home Again. This multimedia presentation explores the construction of narrative and its effect on the notion of site through the production of a mock-documentary and fan-film, which serves as an anchor for the sculptural elements and detailed drawings that accompany it, weaving together fictional elements with theoretical research on the nature of the universe.

The film opens with a lone character dwarfed by the mountainous landscape around him. As the man walks in the distance an all-knowing voice over tells us that his name is Eton Corrasable – a man who has experienced time shifting as a result of his visit to Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty. He has just finished reading The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by journalists Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall and is now obsessed with the story. In the book, Crowhurst enters a competition to sail around the world non-stop, but he fails at the task and covers his shortcomings by falsifying his logbook. In isolation and victim to his own unraveling mind, Crowhurst believes that he has become a cosmic being. Transforming into a cosmic being becomes Eton’s goal as well, in order to understand the complexity of the universe. He travels to the Arctic to further investigate the possibility of wormholes that would support time travel and gathers enough evidence to support his search. He travels to the Cayman Islands to retrace Crowhurst’s last steps. He finds his boat and, with the aid of fringe technology, connects with the existence of an underwater environment that could, in his words, “alleviate his temporal flux.”

In a film within a film, we see Eton going back to Toronto to recreate the film Solaris, based on the book by Stanislaw Lem, but his obsession with time travel and Crowhurst’s fate pulls him out of the metanarrative. This is where both works, one science fiction and one a historical account, and scientific discoveries become intertwined. Eton travels to Pavilion Lake in British Columbia, where colonies of microbialites are actively building reef-like formations that reference architecture with features such as terraces, arches, bridges, depressions, domes and pillars. “The reefs appear to be sentient,” Eton says, and claims they have been studying him as well. He believes that they are trying to access his memories to manipulate him and that they want to prevent him from becoming a cosmic being.

Anything is possible in the fictional planet Solaris. Lem writes the following: “No semantic system is as yet available to illustrate the behaviour of the ocean. The ‘tree-mountains,’ ‘extensors,’ ‘fungoids,’ ‘mimoids,’ ‘symmetriads,’ ‘asymmetriads,’ ‘vertebrids’ and ‘agilus’ are artificial, linguistically awkward terms, but they do give some impression of Solaris to anyone who has only seen the planet in blurred photographs and incomplete films.”[i] Of the mimoids, he explains that the name “indicates their most astonishing characteristics, the imitation of objects, near and far, external to the ocean itself,”[ii] and that “viewed from above, the mimoid resembles a town.”[iii] Langergraber references these mimoid formations in three sculptural works titled Morphological Architecture that emerge from the floor. The sculptures are representations of the reefs as seen in the last animated section of the film. On top of each trunk-like base there is an architectural scene constructed from “kit-bashed” railway models depicting different time periods; all, including the supports, coloured a uniformed grey tone. The buildings appear to be slowly eroding, or perhaps they are being born. The scenes are chaotic, as if a terrible wave has washed over them, and in the turbulence fully-formed ships and train cars have ended on top of these structures. Quartz crystals poke out of the landscape as if fighting for survival among the crowded terrain; they are an echo of the behaviour of the mimoids and microbiliates found in both bodies of water.

Langergraber reimagines these underwater landscapes in two sets of drawings. The first set consists of two larger pencil drawings, sectioned in four quarters and titled The City of The Future Past 3 and 4. These again play off Lem’s vision of mimoid creation in his novel which mirrors the crumbling architecture depicted in the sculptures. Long Island City’s architectural landmarks such as P.S.1 MoMA are depicted in the first drawing as architectural mash-ups of the familiar made unfamiliar, much like the morphological architecture found in the reef sculptures. In the film, the character of Eton returns to Toronto to stage the film Solaris, and this city becomes the subject of the second drawing. A few of its most recognizable buildings are butted against each other to create a mashed up skyline, such as the Toronto City Hall with its iconic curvature, Roy Thompson Hall and St. James Cathedral. On the ground is a small body of water and in it there seems to be a crater; another crater appears at the far edge. Could these opening be portals into parallel worlds?

The second set of drawings, titled String Theory, consists of seven circular cosmological propositions referencing M-theory, which posits that “our universe may be just one in an endless multiverse, a singular bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes.”[iv] Physicist Dr. Michio Kaku states that the heart of an electron is really a string, not a point, and would vibrate if plucked. This vibration would transform it into a neutrino; if plucked again it would turn into a quark, and so on. “The “harmonies” of the strings are the laws of physics.”[v] Langergraber uses this musical metaphor to depict a multiverse in a manner in which perhaps Eton imagined it to be. He, being a fringe scientist, would have kept a logbook of his time travel experiences; this series points back to the notes that he may have kept in his quest for transcendence.

In the film, the narrator wonders if perhaps Crowhurst did not descend into madness after all, but witnessed a distorted reality when parallel universes collided. At the end of it, we see Eton atop a raft loaded with amateur and pseudo-scientific equipment at Pavilion Lake; he is convinced that making contact with the consciousness of the lake will lead him to the answers he has been looking for. He blasts the surface of the lake with a gamma ray burst, believing this will open up a hole in the space-time continuum through which he can exist as a cosmic being. The voice-over states that Eton Corrasable is missing and presumed drowned. The fact that this is a premise that cannot be proved or disapproved leaves the installation open for interpretation and allows for the scientific background to support the narrative. Langergraber builds a complex installation that allows for multiple readings and points of entry, with several pieces fitting together like a puzzle. The notion of a fixed universe is challenged through Eton’s experiences and, as a result, the propositions posed by sci-fi culture become more tangible and plausible.

ANA BARAJAS is the Director of YYZ.

KEITH LANGERGRABER received his BFA from the University of Victoria and his MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in Canada, the United States, and Asia since 1995. He has received many grants and awards for his work, including being on the long list for the Sobey Award in 2009. Langergraber’s work grows from an interest in social, cultural, and political change found through scrutiny of a selected site. His research allows for an understanding of the shifts that have taken place at a location over time. His exhibitions consist of the accumulation and reconstitution of information through the peeling back of layers of the vernacular landscape. Langergraber is currently teaching at Emily Carr University (BC).

KEITH LANGERGRABER would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for their support.

Foolproof Four: Superheroes of the Forest Floor
Buttons are available at YYZ in sets of four. Each set was hand-made and packaged by the artist.
$10.00

Canadians have an understandable fixation with surviving in the natural world. This is evident in cultural production ranging from Roughing it in the Bush, Susanna Moodie’s 1852 account of survival in Duro, Ontario, to Mimio’s own Survivorman. Foraging for edible and medicinal gems has, for most of Canadians, become quite removed from our actual means of survival, yet it persists as a pursuit for some, and part of a dream of self-sufficiency for others

Dubbed the «Foolproof Four» in 1943 by Professor Clyde Christensen, Morel, Shaggy Mane, Puffball and Sulfur Shelf mushrooms are the most common and easily identified edibles hunted by amateur mycologists. The term «Foolproof Four» led Dunning to consider mushrooms as actual superheroes of the natural world. Like all fungi, these mushrooms contribute to planetary survival by providing the imperative function of decay. Culturally, they are weighted with similar dark, mysterious and supernatural characteristics as bats, spiders and cats, on which popular comic book superheroes have been based.

Foolproof Four: Superheroes of the Forest Floor is an installation of four large ceramic sculptures of mushrooms, each sitting on its own plinth. On the walls are four different posters of blank, speech bubble templates: downloadable, freeware graphic tools for comic book designers.  Around the base of each mushroom and on the floor are over 8000 custom-made buttons. There are three sets of buttons. One illustrates superhero logos for each of the mushrooms and another features empty speech bubbles in four different styles taken from comic book templates. The third set suggests possible «superpowers» of the Four with terms taken from scientific descriptions of the life-cycle of mushrooms: Autodeliquescence, Telemorph, Spore Liberation and Cytoplasmic Fusion. Perhaps Shaggy Mane with its curious character of autodeliquescence (self-digestion) is a force to be reckoned with.  And surely they have the united power of spore liberation. The buttons themselves look like mushrooms multiplying and popping up from the floor, spreading and intermingling with the buttons of the other mushrooms. Viewers are invited to take a button, allowing the project to travel spore-like outside of the gallery to other locations.

ANNIE DUNNING takes a playful approach to nature and mystery. A curiosity for the overlooked and unconsidered leads her to deal with mostly common items as subject matter. With an aesthetic that is influenced by craft and DIY style, Dunning explores what greater possibilities common subjects might hold if released from their expected roles. She is interested in examining intersecting elements of culture and the natural world and in conflating various aspects of nature and culture to create new hybrids. Dunning often focus on rediscovering the potential of ordinary or common things, or viewing them from an off-center perspective to confuse conventional hierarchy.

Annie Dunning received an undergraduate degree in fine arts from Mount Allison University and a MFA degree from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and abroad in Japan, Germany and the US.  Dunning’s practice includes collaborative projects, teaching, artist residencies and lectures, and has been funded by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

This text by JULIEN BOIS was published alongside JULIE LEQUIN‘S Top 30 exhibition.

Multidisciplinary artist Julie Lequin’s latest piece, Top 30, presents her personal take on the ups and downs of aging.  From her childhood in the small town of Sorel, Quebec to her graduate years in California, Lequin examines her past with nostalgia and a good dose of humour.  For each year, the artist explores themes of day-to-day life, re-enacting colourful events (both happy an unhappy) and presenting songs engraved in her memory. The excerpts on this exhibition focus on the firsts and lasts chapters of the whole project. The work presented begins in French language and ends in English, illustrating her personal course as a Quebec-raised, California-educated woman. Every chapter is presented as a three-channel video, each part of the image displaying a particular aspect of her personal trajectory.

Along with the videos, anecdotes from Lequin’s daily life are shown through series of watercolours works which depict the houses she once lived in or other anonymous backgrounds (forest age 29, beach age 30). These stand in for the years she spent traveling from an artist residency to another, without a place to really call home.  From the joys and anxieties of childhood to those of acclimatising to new cities and settings, the artist narrates fragments of her life, slightly distorted through the process of auto-fiction. The result is a cartoon-like experience, oscillating between moments of joy and tears. The vivid illustrations underline emotions behind the narratives of everyday triumphs and failures.  From her early years to a recent past, the artist remembers painful events like getting her tonsils removed (age 7) or getting her house broken into (age 27), but also blissful ones like sunbathing through the window (age 1) or finding a hidden gem in a thrift store in Nebraska City (age 29).

Adaptation is a central theme in Lequin’s work, be it Top 30 or her previous videos. Moving to new places and constantly having to make friends (Skateboarding Stories, 2003), having to learn and improve a new language (Speech Lesson, 2005) or dealing with solitude in a foreign environment (Submission to This American Life, 2007) are all universal tales of contemporary nomadism, a central leitmotif in our globalized world.  Yet, throughout her works, Lequin puts her personal narratives behind this theme, making it hers. Top 30 is no exception and presents her exceptional reading on her peculiar life experience, recalling hops between schools, «art camps» and «home.»

Lequin’s first-person account rehabilitates icons from pop culture, linking her intimate existence to the viewer’s own with references appealing to all generations. The artist creates a feeling of familiarity by using images carved into our collective imagery to stage her episodes, be it characters from an American «soap,» James Last’s record sleeves, standing ashtrays or Care Bears.

In the center image, musical devices, often bygone, remind us of the changing nature of the technology which with we grow.  From a toy-turntable to a laptop, the accessories are used to present us a song in habiting the artist’s memory. Once again, Lequin’s recollections blend with those of the public who see familiar objects appearing on the screen.  The songs announce and mark out the milestone transformations in Lequin’s life; nursery rhymes (age 0 and 1), Jean Lapointe’s unforgettable Chante-la ta chanson (age 3), the French theme song from the anime The Mysterious Cities of Gold (age 7), the Arcade Fire’s ballad In The Backseat (age 26), Goodbye Song by The Moldy Peaches (age 29), etc.  These songs express the inevitable changes of her musical interests, moulded by experiences with the mundane and the extravagant, the conventional and the marginal artistic milieus.

Like the stories Lequin presents are altered by the auto-fiction process, the songs are also transformed yet trough another method.  From their original suggested support in the middle frame, they are re-interpreted by an amateur singer in the third tier of the image. For each chapter, the artist recruited a pregnant friend (age 0), a fellow artist (Montreal-based rapper Donzelle, age 1) and relatives to perform the pertinent song a capella. The effect is as if they were singing over the musical device, with the latter magically muted.  As the performer is the age the excerpt depicts, the viewer can relate to the different emotional reactions associated with the music chosen by the artist and the fragility or pride of the interpreters.

In the last video, Lequin reports on her conclusions after thirty years of existence. Back in Los Angeles, she realizes the high expectations she’s erroneously put on her friends and the unconditional love of her mother. Ending with Julie herself singing Luc Plamondon’s Les uns avec les autres from rock-opera Starmania, she makes a point in expressing her individuality and the necessity of self-reliance.  Buying her own birthday cake she repeats words of wisdom from her mother: «On n’est jamais mieux servi que par soi-même.»1  Shaped by our journeys and encounters we are nevertheless alone when it comes to dealing with life. As Plamondon wrote: «Au bout du compte/ on se rend compte/ qu’on est toujours tout seul au monde.»2

Notes:

[1] «You are never better served than by yourself»

[2] «In the end/ we realise/ we’re always alone in this world»

JULIEN BOIS is an international relations Master’s candidate, web-entrepreneur and art enthusiast.  Specializing on China and intellectual property issues, he has written in Paris-based journal Monde Chinois (Spring 2011) and collaborated on University of Ottawa’s book China in the 21^st Century: Multidiscinary Perspectives from students in Canada and China (forthcoming).

JULIE LEQUIN is a French Canadian artist. She received a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from Art Center College of Design. In 2007, 2nd Cannons Publications published Lequin’s first book and DVD project The Ice Skating Tree Opera – Director’s Cuts. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally at venues such as the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in California, La Centrale Powerhouse in Montreal, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art in General and White Columns in New York City. Lequin is the 2011 recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Award, an honour given by the Canada Council for the Arts. Lequin is happily living and working in Montreal.

KEITH LANGERGRABER | YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN
SATURDAY 07 JANUARY 2012 – SATURDAY 31 MARCH 2012


JULIE LEQUIN| 
TOP 30
SATURDAY 07 JANUARY 2012 – SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2012


YYZUNLIMITED:
JACOB HORWOOD | DETAIL WITHOUT A DRAWING BOARD
SATURDAY 07 JANUARY 2012 – SATURDAY 21 JULY 2012


OPENING RECEPTION | FRIDAY 06 JANUARY 2012 – 8:00PM TO 10:00PM

KEITH LANGERGRABER | YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

You Can’t Go Home Again will explore various facets of science fiction fan culture as it intersects with personal utopias. The project will critique the utopian gesture of the lone male seeking out places of isolation, away from the civilizing impulses of society; conjuring up a period of creativity, as well as loneliness, alienation and moral disintegration. Merging sci-fi references with documents that chronicle a solitary sea voyage and personal revelation, this installation will complicate assumptions about what it means to be “a fan” across disciplines. Employing new theories of fandom, the exhibition will open up a range of possibilities in regards to consumption, production, criticality, and play.

KEITH LANGERGRABER received his BFA from the University of Victoria and his MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in Canada, the United States, and Asia since 1995.  He has received many grants and awards for his work, including being on the long list for the Sobey Award in 2009. Langergraber’s work grows from an interest in social, cultural, and political change found through scrutiny of a selected site. His research allows for an understanding of the shifts that have taken place at a location over time. His exhibitions consist of the accumulation and reconstitution of information through the peeling back of layers of the vernacular landscape. Langergraber is currently teaching at Emily Carr University (BC).

Read ANA BARAJAS‘ The Consciousness of the Lake, an essay about KEITH LANGERGRABER‘S exhibition.

JULIE LEQUIN | TOP 30

For her first solo exhibition in Toronto, Julie Lequin presents a selection of chapters from a new multidisciplinary video installation which condenses each year of her life. Effervescent with humor, storytelling, error and wordplay, Top 30 weaves the line between autobiography and fiction.

JULIE LEQUIN is a French Canadian artist. She received a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from Art Center College of Design. In 2007, 2nd Cannons Publications published Lequin’s first book and DVD project The Ice Skating Tree Opera – Director’s Cuts. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally at venues such as the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in California, La Centrale Powerhouse in Montreal, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art in General and White Columns in New York City. Lequin is the 2011 recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Award, an honour given by the Canada Council for the Arts. Lequin is happily living and working in Montreal.

Read JULIEN BOIS‘ Top 30: Souvenirs and Suitcases, an essay about JULIE LEQUIN‘S exhibition.

JACOB HORWOOD | DETAIL WITHOUT A DRAWING BOARD

Horwood developed these series of screenprinted one and two-off pieces with little emphasis on design. He wishes to demystify the idea that in screenprinting, a piece of art is first designed in its entirety, and then produced. The execution of the work and its composition is completed almost entirely in the studio by the artist. This stresses the practice itself, relying on trial and error, as well as color harmony to create new work. This series is a more spontaneous practice, and utilized as little source material as possible.

JACOB HORWOOD is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in printmaking, publishing, and sound art. In 2004, he co-founded the experimental sound art record label Beniffer Editions. It has released over 110 hand-made artist multiples on various formats, including LPs, books, box-sets and cassettes. Horwood is the administrator of Punchclock Printing and works as a specialty screen printer, assisting other artists and designers interested in the full realization of their ideas. He is also one-half of music concrete duo Gastric Female Reflex, who have released music and toured internationally. Horwood’s work is informed by process based painting techniques applied to screen-printing, visual after image demonstrations, re-appropriation, and artist multiple presentation.

BOOK LAUNCH
FRIDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2011
7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
YYZ Artists’ Outlet
#140-401 Richmond St. W
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8

Originally drawn and written as a series of online poetic vignettes, UNSPENT LOVE addresses themes such as hope, fear, and human frailty. Evolving through numerous iterations, including a gallery installation supported by the Nick Novak Fellowship at Open Studio, UNSPENT LOVE most recently appeared as an experimental wall installation at YYZ Artists’ Outlet. One chapter of this work won first place in the graphic narrative category of This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt in 2010.

Conundrum Press is thrilled to announce the book version of the project, complete with a letterpressed wraparound jacket printed at Gaspereau Press. Embracing a variety of genres, from poetry to relational art to graphic novel, UNSPENT LOVE is as varied as the characters who populate its quintessentially human stories.

SHANNON GERARD received her Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education Degrees from York University in 1996, where she completed her Masters Degree in 2007. In 2008 she received the Visual Arts (Emerging) Grant from the Toronto Arts Council. Gerard has exhibited her work in Canada and the United States including Green Lantern Gallery in Chicago (2009), Open Studio in Toronto (2008), and also took part in the MoCCA Festival in New York City in 2007. Gerard currently teaches courses in print media and nano-publishing at OCAD University.

Shannon Gerard’s work will be on dislay at YYZ until December 10, 2011.

For more information and to track the YYZUNLIMITED project, check out Shannon Gerard’s blog at unspentlove.tumblr.com.

YYZ CURRENT PROGRAMMING
Click each artist for more information

SATURDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2011-SATURDAY 10 DECEMBER 2011

DIL HILDEBRAND | Back to the Drawing Board
ANNIE DUNNING | Foolproof Four: Superheroes of the Forest Floor
DAVID COURT + JOSH THORPE | Around YYZ
SHANNON GERARD | UNSPENT LOVE, or, Things I Wish I Told You

ANNIE DUNNING | FOOLPROOF FOUR: SUPERHEROES OF THE FOREST FLOOR

Canadians have an understandable fixation with surviving in the natural world. This is evident in cultural production ranging from Roughing it in the Bush, Susanna Moodie’s 1852 account of survival in Duro, Ontario, to Mimio’s own Survivorman. Foraging for edible and medicinal gems has, for most of Canadians, become quite removed from our actual means of survival, yet it persists as a pursuit for some, and part of a dream of self-sufficiency for others

Dubbed the «Foolproof Four» in 1943 by Professor Clyde Christensen, Morel, Shaggy Mane, Puffball and Sulfur Shelf mushrooms are the most common and easily identified edibles hunted by amateur mycologists. The term «Foolproof Four» led Dunning to consider mushrooms as actual superheroes of the natural world. Like all fungi, these mushrooms contribute to planetary survival by providing the imperative function of decay. Culturally, they are weighted with similar dark, mysterious and supernatural characteristics as bats, spiders and cats, on which popular comic book superheroes have been based.

Foolproof Four: Superheroes of the Forest Floor is an installation of four large ceramic sculptures of mushrooms, each sitting on its own plinth. On the walls are four different posters of blank, speech bubble templates: downloadable, freeware graphic tools for comic book designers.  Around the base of each mushroom and on the floor are over 8000 custom-made buttons. There are three sets of buttons. One illustrates superhero logos for each of the mushrooms and another features empty speech bubbles in four different styles taken from comic book templates. The third set suggests possible «superpowers» of the Four with terms taken from scientific descriptions of the life-cycle of mushrooms: Autodeliquescence, Telemorph, Spore Liberation and Cytoplasmic Fusion. Perhaps Shaggy Mane with its curious character of autodeliquescence (self-digestion) is a force to be reckoned with.  And surely they have the united power of spore liberation. The buttons themselves look like mushrooms multiplying and popping up from the floor, spreading and intermingling with the buttons of the other mushrooms. Viewers are invited to take a button, allowing the project to travel spore-like outside of the gallery to other locations.

ANNIE DUNNING takes a playful approach to nature and mystery. A curiosity for the overlooked and unconsidered leads her to deal with mostly common items as subject matter. With an aesthetic that is influenced by craft and DIY style, Dunning explores what greater possibilities common subjects might hold if released from their expected roles. She is interested in examining intersecting elements of culture and the natural world and in conflating various aspects of nature and culture to create new hybrids. Dunning often focus on rediscovering the potential of ordinary or common things, or viewing them from an off-center perspective to confuse conventional hierarchy.

Annie Dunning received an undergraduate degree in fine arts from Mount Allison University and a MFA degree from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and abroad in Japan, Germany and the US.  Dunning’s practice includes collaborative projects, teaching, artist residencies and lectures, and has been funded by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

DIL HILDEBRAND | BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

For this, his first solo exhibition in Toronto, Dil Hildebrand presents a new body of work.  Back to the Drawing Board represents a focal shift away from the photographic and toward a diagrammatic approach to the image; an incarnation that abandons the image altogether.

DIL HILDEBRAND was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and obtained his MFA at Concordia University, Montreal in 2008. In 2006 he won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition and has since participated in many exhibitions throughout Canada, the United States and abroad.  Upcoming exhibitions include group shows at OBORO, Montreal (curated by David Elliott) and Espace Virtuel, Chicoutimi.  In 2010, Hildebrand participated in the 4th Beijing International Art Biennale 2010 in Beijing, China, and produced Long Drop: The Paintings of Dil Hildebrand, a monograph by Anteism Press. With critical texts by Louise Déry, Richard Rhodes and Christine Redfern, Long Drop surveys a selection of Hildebrand’s paintings on canvas and paper from 2006 to 2009.  His work has been collected by major museums throughout Canada, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Dil Hildebrand is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.  He lives and works in Montréal.

DAVID COURT+JOSH THORPE | AROUND YYZ

YYZUNLIMITED invites artists to imagine and reinvent YYZ as a site of opportunity through a series of «interventions». These interventions engage potential sites outside of YYZ’s regular programming. YYZ is pleased to introduce an audio intervention by David Court and Josh Thorpe.

David Court and Josh Thorpe present the last in a series of four audio tours of the area surrounding YYZ.  This tour features a conversation with Scott Sørli and Flavio Trevisan about YYZ itself.

This audio tour is part of the year-long project, Around YYZ, for the YYZUNLIMITED programme. These audio walks are informal, meandering conversations, offering a casual but analytic inquiry, beginning at YYZ and moving out from there. Each lasts approximately an hour and can be encountered in three ways: 1) on an MP3 player borrowed from YYZ (allows the listener to walk the tour while listening), 2) over a set of speakers at the threshold to YYZ, and 3) on the YYZ website. Taking YYZ as the point of departure, the walks extend the mode of attention of the gallery into its surrounding contexts, seeking to draw attention and add complexity to the experience of public space.

DAVID COURT is an artist and writer living in New York. He has exhibited solo and collaborative projects across Canada and in New York, with current and upcoming projects for Printed Matter (with Josh Thorpe) and the 2011 CAFKA Biennial. David was involved as a contributor for the publication «Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975 – 2008,» co-published by the Center for Contemporary Canadian Art and Plug In Editions. He has written reviews and catalogue texts for publication in Canada, China and the US, including C Magazine, Fillip, and Art Papers. In 2008 he participated in the residency «Making Artistic Inquiry Visible» at the Banff Center. David holds a Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2009) and a BFA from NSCAD University (2006).

JOSH THORPE is an artist and writer living in Toronto. He has a Master’s in Visual Studies from University of Toronto and he teaches at Ontario College of Art and Design and U of T. His work has been shown in Canada, the US, and Europe. His involvement in publishing has produced interviews, articles, and books, including Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide (Art Metropole) and a monograph on the unrealized proposals of Gordon Lebredt (CCCA and Plug In ICA).

SHANNON GERARD | UNSPENT LOVE, OR, THINGS I WISH I TOLD YOU

Originally drawn and written as a series of online vignettes for the comics publisher Top Shelf Productions,Unspent Love addresses themes such as hope, fear, and human frailty. The project was later produced as a multi-media bookwork with the support of Open Studio’s Nick Novak Scholarship (2010).

This third iteration at YYZ will evolve the project in a series of narrative images, unfolding between November 2010 and October 2011 as part of its YYZUNLIMITED program. The experimental space of the wall allows imaginative storytelling possibilities to develop through layering, time-lapse animation and wheat pasting. Gerard will modify the wallwork on a weekly basis for the duration of the project.

SHANNON GERARD received her Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education Degrees from York University in 1996, where she completed her Masters Degree in 2007. In 2008 she received the Visual Arts (Emerging) Grant from the Toronto Arts Council. Gerard has exhibited her work in Canada and the United States including Green Lantern Gallery in Chicago (2009), Open Studio in Toronto (2008), and also took part in the MoCCA Festival in New York City in 2007. Gerard currently teaches courses in print media and nano-publishing at OCAD University.

For more information and to track the project, check out Shannon Gerard’s blog at unspentlove.tumblr.com.

Photo Credit: Mike Juneau

T- shirt Edition of 100

In many cases, during my practice as a screen printer, the biggest successes have come from moments when something happens compositionally that wasn’t intended.  A reversed layer, test prints on unusual substrates, printing onto other prints, all have very beneficial results to assist towards seeing an image in a new way. For this edition, I began by individually hot water dying each shirt. This results in a material that is painted without form or specific direction. When my «composed» layers were then put onto the t-shirt, a divide was created, as well as a partnership, between the intentional and the fortuitous.

The t-shirts are available in eight colour variations and can be purchased for $25 each. For more information please contact mallory@yyzartistsoutlet.org.

JACOB HORWOOD is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in printmaking, publishing and sound art.  He co-founded in 2004 the experimental sound art record label Beniffer Editions.  It has released over 110 hand-made artist multiples on various formats including LPs, books, box-sets and cassettes.  Horwood is the administrator of Punchclock Printing and works as a specialty screen printer assisting other artists and designers interested in the full realization of their ideas.  He is also one half of music concrete duo Gastric Female Reflex, who have released music and toured internationally.  Horwood’s work is informed by process based painting techniques applied to screen-printing, visual after image demonstrations, re-appropriation and artist multiple presentation.

Tom Dean, THIS IS PARADISE, inside the Cameron House. Image Credit: Peter McCallum, 1983. © Tom Dean

This essay was commissioned by and for This is Paradise, exhibition at MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art)  from June 24 to August 21, 2011. This and other essays for this exhibition have been supported by YYZ Artists’ Outlet and YYZ Publishing.

Suspended Paradise by Andrew James Paterson

The sign (by Tom Dean) informs us that this is indeed “Paradise“, and it must be since there are (mostly) men drinking at tables below that sign who have been drinking here since World War II. Some of these characters leave at “last call for daytime prices” and some soldier on, becoming part of the nighttime mix. And what a mix it was.

A friend of mine always asks me (as a long-term tenant) how is The Cameron. I’m never quite sure what the question refers to. Does it refer to the business, to the bar, to the upstairs accommodation, or to some all-encompassing entity? Does it refer to some social experiment or some abstraction at least several degrees removed from everyday reality?

Does it refer to a “community”? What is meant by that over-familiar word, anyway? A geographical community, or an artistic counterpart? Perhaps the reference is closer to a scene than a community. But both words imply commonality, so …? Was there a school of thought either originating at or coalescing around The Cameron? No, mercifully there were far too many contradictions and even oppositions – both during the 1981-7 period and indeed ever since.

When The Cameron House changed management and mandate in 1981, the neighbourhood around Queen Street West was in full swing and also in flux. Older artist-run galleries (A Space) had moved to Toronto’s downtown west, and newer ARCs (YYZ, Mercer Union) had recently opened in the vicinity. There were also younger artists  – painters, sculptors and others, who felt that the artist-run galleries had become institutionalized and inaccessible. The waiting lists were too long, so alternatives were necessary. There were also many artists making art that was social, that involved crowds and audiences who were themselves performative, as in they enjoyed being on display.

The new Cameron became an immediate successor to bars or taverns which had gained artistic reputations via their clienteles. The Cabana Room, in the Spadina Hotel at King and Spadina, had earlier been a fluidly interdisciplinary performative venue but now it was really just another live band venue. The Beverley Tavern, further east on Queen, was no longer the Ontario College of Art watering hole that it had been previously. The Peter Pan restaurant wasn’t the art hangout it had been in the nineteen seventies, when it catered to artist clientele and employed artist-servers. The Cameron also could be viewed as a descendant of Toronto boho landmarks such as The Pilot in the now-gentrified Yorkville neighbourhood, as well as Grossman’s on Spadina just south of College, with its mixture of draft-dodgers and peace activists, hard-edged abstract painters, and generic blues bands.

The late Felix Partz, one of the three artists comprising General Idea, opined in the performance Press Conference (1977), again in the videotape Pilot (also 1977), and then reasserted in Shut the Fuck Up (1986) that “if it doesn’t sell, then it’s not art”. (1) For not only artist-run centre people, that quote sounded rather Thatcherite or Reaganite (or Mulroney-Lite).  This quote is also a clear ancestor of the twenty-first century Instant Coffee maxim “Be social or get lost”. Does the verb “sell” refer to strictly economic transactions? Or does it, like the word “social”, refer to the notion of entering into play, engaging audiences, mirroring scenes or communities rather than staring them in the face and demanding respect or reverence?

Certainly, in the early period of The Cameron House, even seemingly hermetic practices such as painting became more “social” in flavour. Not only the figure but also scene or salon portraits were back with a vengeance. Performance art and video art also began to flirt with their host and ghost mediums – theatre, film, and television. With the art boom in full swing, there was pressure to go big rather than remain small. Out of the garrets and into the public realm, which included the bars as well as the media? In the spirit of the early decade, there were a lot of people talking being interdisciplinary, about “crossing over”. Artists who refused to confine themselves to singular disciplines have always existed – they certainly exist today. Many such artists have profitable careers thanks to their eclecticism. However … there is crossing over as in truly appealing to different audiences who have not traditionally blended or interacted; and there is “crossing over” as a marketing plan. Mix in this with a little bit of that and then … voila! That mindset tends to result in messy confusion, rather than creative collaboration.

But the bar itself was certainly a mix. In the front room, one could circulate (or wait on tables) and identify different tables with different galleries or art organizations. There’s the Art Metropole table, there‘s YYZ at another table, there‘s Mercer Union, there’s FUSE magazine, there’s Chromazone, there are the abstract painters, and then there are so many more. On many nights all of these people would inhabit the same geographical space. Some stayed put at their tables. Some didn’t like each other very much; and some did make a point of crossing the floor and socializing. Then there were unaligned individuals, younger but not only younger artists, looking for exhibition opportunities. (2) Many of them were suspicious of the governmental granting agencies. Many artists of course benefited from governmental largesse but there was and still is legitimate criticism of the agencies in question: they were too political; they were too apolitical; they were frankly too white-bread and inaccessible to a large variety of eligible artists. Quasi-anarchic impulses and quick-draw capitalism have often been difficult to distinguish and the early decade was a time when many were impatient with bureaucratic demands and restrictions. Somebody or a pair or group of people has an idea. So why not get working on it immediately and to hell with handouts?

However… there did seem for many to be a very appealing energy at the Cameron itself and in the neighbourhood. But did, or could, that energy sustain?  Energy by definition attracts other energies, and profile attracts more and larger media. Queen Street West and the Cameron itself became brand names – its players and inhabitants had these tastes, they consumed these products. Distinctions between “community” and targeted demographic or market became messier than they already were. Parallel restaurants and music venues sprang up – The Rivoli and The Bamboo. City-TV moved into the Ryerson building on Queen West and displaced non-profit tenants A Space, Trinity Square Video, FUSE, and others. Everything had to get bigger and bigger. If something isn’t visible, then how can that something exist?

As bodies became defined by means of their consumption habits and so forth, bodies also came under attack. What was initially called GRID (Gay Related Immunity Disease) was renamed AIDS (Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome).  As HIV/AIDS literally threatened and killed bodies, profiles or images of bodies also came under the microscope. As the AIDS pandemic intensified, as representational questions which had been swept under carpets during the top of the Roaring Eighties became impossible for anybody with a brain to ignore, and as markets began seriously crashing. Reflexivity began to resurface. Image-making became less celebratory – visual and media-arts entered a suspended zone oscillating between activism and mourning. Art became more “social” (in relation to socio-political issues) and less “social” (in relation to being seen and hanging out). Performance for its own sake was no longer good enough, if indeed it ever had been in the first place. People got older – they read and thought more. Energies must either seriously re-charge or else simply fade.

Notes

1 – This quote dates back to General Idea’s performance “Press Conference”, presented at the Western Front in Vancouver on March 9, 1977. Segments of this performance were integrated into GI’s videotape “Pilot”, produced for television by OECA TV (The Ontario Educational Corrections Authority, now TV Ontario), later in 1977. The author would like to thank Fern Bayer and A.A. Bronson for this information.

2 – Many of the younger artists who felt alienated and excluded by both non-profit and for-profit galleries reacted creatively by forming collectives that operated on a project-by-project basis without gallery overheads and with minimal bureaucratic baggage. These collectives included: Public Access, Republic, Nethermind, Spontaneous Combustion, Blanket, and numerous others. Cold City Gallery, a commercial gallery operating parallel to an artists’ collective, is also interesting in this context.

Suggested Bibliography

Philip Monk, Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years, “C” International Contemporary Art No. 59, in conjunction with Power Plant exhibition Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years, Sept. 25- Dec. 20, 1998

Barbara Fischer, YYZ ⎯ An Anniversary, Decalog: YYZ 1979-1989 (YYZ Books Toronto, 1993, pp.5-31)

AA Bronson, The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-run Spaces as Museums by Artists, From Sea to Shining Sea (Power Plant, 1987, pp. 164-169, reprinted from Museums by Artists, Art Metropole, Toronto, 1983)

Rosemary Donnegan, What Ever Happened to Queen Street West?, FUSE, No. 42 (fall 1986, pp. 10-24)

Dot Tuer, The CEAC Was Banned in Canada, Mining the Media Archive (YYZ Books, 2005, pp. 55-90, reprinted from “C” No. 11, 1986, pp. 22-37)

Clive Robertson, A Culture of Eviction: Beer, Boats, Bohemians & Bureaucracies, FUSE, Vol. XI, No.1, Fall 1987, pp. 42-45

ANDREW J. PATERSON is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, video and film, musical composition, and both critical and fiction writing. His performances and videotapes have been presented and exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally. Paterson was formerly the lead singer and principal writer for a band called The Government, between 1977 and 1982, which made several recordings and one “music video” How Many Fingers?. Paterson has served as a board member for Trinity Square Video, A Space, and YYZ Artists’ Outlet, all Toronto-situated artist-run galleries or organizations. He has previously curated media-art programmes for Trinity Square Video, A Space, Mercer Union, Cinematheque Ontario, Pleasure Dome, Available Light (Ottawa) and YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and he has written on media-art and cultural politics for FUSE, PUBLIC, IMPULSE, and FILE, as well as contributing to anthologies published by Gallery TPW, Pleasure Dome, and YYZBOOKS. He is the co-editor of Money, Value, Art, published by YYZBOOKS in 2001. In 2003, Paterson debuted , an inter-media performance remix of his film and video works in tandem with performative monologues, co-produced by Pleasure Dome and the 7a*11d Performance Art Festival-both of Toronto. Mono Logical has been presented in Calgary, Kingston, and Winnipeg, each performance characterized by a different remix. And, in 2005, he edited Grammar & Not-Grammar, an anthology of scripts and essays by media-artist Gary Kibbins, published by YYZBOOKS. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Paterson’s own media-works have been of two different but parallel strands. Some works are comprised of Super-8 film stocks, shot by the artist walking behind the camera and synthesizing documentary with performance. Several different works are composed of the artists’s still graphic images collaged into a Final Cut Pro editing program, and are arguably as much examples of “visual art” as they are film or video. All of his media-works also involve writing and original music. However, Patersonhas recently been experimenting with wordless moving images.  As well, he is one of the coordinators of the 8 Fest. a festival for small-gauge film.

This essay was commissioned by and for This is Paradise, exhibition at MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art)  from June 24 to August 21, 2011. This and other essays for this exhibition have been supported by YYZ Artists’ Outlet and YYZ Publishing.

PARADISE LOST:
This is Paradise Exhibition & Cameron Culture Essay, 1987
By Donna Lypchuk

PREFACE – I CREATE A LIVING PAINTING

In 1987, Clark Rogers, the artistic director of Theater Passe Muraille, made me a deal. He dared me to write a play about the Cameron Hotel, where I lived for several years and demanded I make it a “living painting.”

This taunting enthusiast would actually leave messages on my machine teasing me about writing this play which was to be the penultimate theatrical portrait of Queen Street bohemian life. He would hold court on patios and yell at me as I walked by, “Going to write that play, Lypchuk? Too chicken shit to write that play!? Where’s my play LYPCHUK?”  He promised me that if I produced the script that he would mount it as part of the 1987/88 season at Passe Muraille.

I holed myself up and wrote the Monster-Play- That–Killed-Queen-Street. I then took the 113 page manuscript with it’s 43 characters and several musical numbers and handed it to Clark, who was enjoying listening to his favorite song “Forever Young” on the jukebox in a dive down the street from the theater. He spit up his beer when I smacked the huge cyst thumping Bible of a script on the table. He swore at me, accused me with great ferocity of trying to murder him because it was going to kill him to get it onstage and then like the shape-shifting laser beam of a genius that he was kept his promise to direct it.

The result of my bet with Clark Rogers was Tragedy of Manners, a two hour semi-musical about “the people in your neighborhood “ that boasted a cast of 43 local actors.  Each actor was sponsored per week by a local business. It ran for eight weeks and to this day is the largest scripted theatrical performance ever put on a stage in Toronto that was not produced by the Mirvishes.

Tragedy of Manners is an unusual play because we took the idea of the living painting and mass portraiture quite seriously.  The enormous multi-level set, designed by Clark’s wife (and the current curator of this show), Rae Johnson, was a mirrored replication of the interior of The Cameron including Tom Dean’s iconic “This is Paradise” with the lettering done in reverse.

One of the things that Clark and I wanted to express as part of this living painting was what an “art gallery” the Cameron had become or “le Musee de Beer” as I refer to it in the Cameron Culture essay here.

A unique component of the play was a slide show of works by most of the artists in the current MOCCA “This is Paradise” 2011 show. Images of paintings that had been exhibited at the Cameron House were projected on an enormous scrim at the back of the stage. Every two minutes through the two-hour production, the set changed to feature the work of another Queen Street artist.

Just as a bit of background to my years of living at the Cameron. I was invited by Paul Sannella to live there. I first lived in his old room over the bar right next to Handsome Ned for several months and then was moved upstairs to a room next to Andrew James Paterson.

The second room, the infamous Suite Sixteen, used to be inhabited by Rae Johnson before she fell in love with Clark Rogers. I was honored to be in a room where so many steamy raw, powerful oil paintings about the human condition had been created.

Tragedy of Manners reflected my love for my life at the Cameron Hotel and the conceits of the artists in its orbit. The composition of the play structure is based on the Golden Mean mathematical principal. Each character had exactly the same number of lines so that when it was broken down for scenes, the resulting chart made a perfect figure 8.

Every character in the play was based on a real person that was in my life on Queen Street West and then played by actors, musicians and performers who frequented the Cameron Hotel. The scenes culminated in tableaus that had the archetypal character portraits frozen in a mirror; much the same way memories freeze in the mind of a chronic alcoholic or drowsing opiate user.  In fact, the relationship between art production and alcohol and drug abuse was a huge theme not only in the play, but also in the original “This is Paradise” curation and my essay that was written to go with it (and never published) called Cameron Culture.

The essay Cameron Culture was originally written to accompany the original This is Paradise exhibition in 1987 in the lobby of Theater Passe Muraille. That collection of 43 paintings (same number as actors in the cast) then travelled in an expanded version to Gallery 101 in Ottawa.  The show that Herb Tookey took to Ottawa also included posters and ephemera from events at the Cameron.

The visual art represented in this MOCCA 2011 This is Paradise show includes many of the paintings that were originally shown in the lobby of Theater Passe Muraille as well as in the slide show on the set of Tragedy of Manners.

I originally wrote this essay as a catalogue to be published by Gallery 101 but the gallery never came through with payment or publication and nobody ever read it or saw it. I remember sadly stashing away this enormous 60 page essay after spending weeks writing and wondering if I would have to wait until I was dead to see it published.

Thankfully!  I have had to only wait twenty five years for twenty pages to be published!

This sixty page examination of art, music and performance at the Cameron has remained in a box until May 2011 when Rae Johnson and I dove into my storage locker and unearthed a long scrolling hard copy of it that was printed off on one of those old fashioned dot matrix printers.

So here it is, (text intact but with sections on performance and music at the Cameron excised for the sake of space) after nearly a quarter of a century after it’s original conception and curation – I give to you the goddamn essay on Cameron Culture written in 1987 to go with the This is Paradise exhibition at Theatre Passe Muraille created by myself, Herb Tookey, Rae Johnson and Clark Rogers with a great deal of support and assistance from Garnet Press Gallery owner Carla Garnet.

Keep in mind that I was still living at the Cameron when I wrote the essay to follow and the present tense of some of the language reflects that.  It is also my hope that anyone left out of the MOCCA 2011 show might find their contributions to the This is Paradise legacy discussed here.

My only real sorrow about resurrecting these lost thoughts about paradise, is that the late Paul Sannella, who also acted in Tragedy of Manners, never got to read it.

In memoriam, I would like to dedicate this essay to Paul, and the memory of his kindness for offering me a place to live at the Cameron Hotel in the first place. I was only supposed to stay a month, I stayed nearly a decade.

Donna Lypchuk, Toronto, June 7, 2011

THIS IS PARADISE 1987: CAMERON CULTURE

By Donna Lypchuk

The “take over” of The Cameron Public House happened on October 15^th, 1981 under the auspicious acumens of Herb Tookey and Paul Sennella.  It was a simple operation; nothing too melodramatic.

The Cameron “regulars” (literally those who fought for us in the war) still waft in about noon for their first drafts of the day. The lurid spectre of day time soap operas still underscore the “bad reality that makes a good anecdote” at the twenty or so little round tables where these men still sit, breathing in the foul exhalations from the night before in the insular womb like darkness that is the Cameron Public House by day.

The jukebox remains; a syncro-pathic monster that attests to the place’s inherent schizophrenia.  The brightness of the Cameron at night can likened in to the madness that glints in the eyes of a maniac or a genius. It is a madness bred of a volatile, circus-like atmosphere, that is about as funny as Fellini; alternatively sad and Sadian, Hell bound one night and Heaven Homeward the next, yet always home for some.

It makes you wonder if any of these old men, The Cameron Regulars, ever momentarily woke up from the yeast-ridden reverie of their own angry inner monologue, to notice Herbie and Paul plotting, scheming and house cleaning for the future; that subtle changes of an architectural nature were taking place right before his eyes morphing his favorite black drinking hole into a virtual glitzy Palace of Post Modern art; ever noticed with a sense of smug, private irony Tom Dean painting his now famously definitive THIS IS PARADISE on the walls in bold, gold letters and mumbled to himself, “The lunatics are taking over the asylum…”

Since the day of that “takeover” the Cameron Public House has become a petrie dish of activity; a breeding ground for creativity, conspiracy and controversy.

As I write this I am noticing that spray-painted on the wall across the street from the Cameron is a bit of amateur prophecy: “Just Another Bunch of Lemmings …”   — a piece of social commentary about the Cameron that is typically hypercritical and oh-so-Torontonian.

From a social and economic point of view, the Cameron has always been a diamond in the rough representing all facets of the local Toronto art community. And the Cameron as an entity has always challenged what the upper echelon’s (the Smugly Fucklings of Scotty Symons fame) idea of what sophistication should be.

From the day the doors of the Cameron opened dilettantes and debutantes, actors, writers, musicians and artists flocked to the new venue like lemmings rushing to the edge of the cliff only to discover pleasantly enough that at its end was not the customary plunge into obscurity and decadence but a springboard to prominence and feature articles in hip, glossy little magazines.

Socially the experience of “going to the Cameron” can be raw; perhaps a better word is rare. The terminal uniqueness of being in a place or time that allows so many kindred spirits to effortlessly gather and organize themselves (like ants giving each other telepathic messages) is the stuff of which great movements in art, literature and music are made.  We are in the process of creating this movement now, with shows like Chromaliving under our belt and such times of profilic art production are indeed rare!

What the Cameron had to offer was a plastic platform: whether it was as small as a personal soapbox to scream from in the back room or as self-conciously grandiose as sculptures stuck on the side of the building. It seemed as if here, “every grape in the bunch had a vine to hang from.”

At the Cameron there are people who swear that they will never read again because they are trapped in visual space forever mingling with the hopelessly depressed and literary who are convinced that Gutenberg is dead also mingling with the real relics from the late seventies who sneer at you and say, “I was a punk rocker before you were a punk rocker”, mingling with the hippie suffering from over-synochrocity as the result of doing too much bad coke and acid at Rochedale.  The dream is no longer dead…

The Queen Street West at Community was desperately in need of congress; a constituency of artists who had faith in their own future and who had each other’s back no matter what tiny-minded sexist dumb as a Smurf critic writing for a big scary newspaper wrote about them.

Contrary to populist myth, not all artists are self-destructive. One only has to look at the energy and the enthusiasm with which the artistic community has responded by embellishing the actual Cameron House building with its special brand of loving territorialism. The idea of the Cameron has been embraced and then possessed by the spirit and the fervor of the street.

It is obvious at the time of the Cameron Public House’s opening that the new owners spied with their little eyes that the art community was in dire need of centralization; a cross roads, a meeting place, a town square.

This is an idea expressed in a painting by Andy Fabo called “Ye Olde Cameron House” which makes an allegorical allusion to a town square in medevial England. It depicts one of the residents in the hotel – Robert Stewart, dancing in a village square. This work refers to, among other things, the idea of the spectacle the Cameron had become in terms of its’s social regalia and how important music was to the scene.  One of the most refreshing things about it is that is that there was such a revival of oral and story-telling traditions at the Cameron; it was not a bar for people who watch too much T.V..

The Cameron’s call to celebrate Halloween in 1981 (the first big party) was closely followed by the establishment’s inaugural art exhibition; a selection of paintings by Rae Johnson recalling images from Polaroids taken of that night. It was an art show that clearly belied this community’s fetish for dressing up in drag.

One of the key images in that show was a portrait of Robert Stewart, singer and base player with The Government, in full drag as a big beefy blonde. It is important to mention here that the powerful personae of Robert Stewart has functioned as a sort resident muse throughout these last seven years in the works of various visual artists. For example, Eldon Garnet’s Cameron Public House: Privacy series of color photographs is redolent with the pouty, pervy image of the Genesis P-Orridge-like Stewart.

It is apt that the Cameron Public House’s first exhibition was about Halloween; in a place where “every night is Halloween”. Rae Johnson’s painterly bounce off of the Polaroids was indicative of this community’s love of charade and parade and of the sometimes spooky and violent night life that is as much as part of Cameron Culture as it’s “we all live in a happy village” side.

On that same Halloween night there was another ever so spontaneous event taking place upstairs in the as of yet unoccupied chambers of the hotel; three installations in three rooms by artist Amy Wilson. One room was draped with a giant handmade American flag and the other two were filled with handkerchiefs and postcards. This show was very different than the one taking place in the bar. Downstairs was a salon; upstairs was a post-structuralist, post-sci-fi chunk of Spock’s brain.  One show loomed over the other like the conscience of a guilty whore.

Downstairs was Passion and upstairs was Reason.  This was part of the dichotomous and spontaneous nature of the Cameron. Art was always “thinking about itself.”

The Cameron Public House’s existence after this magic number of seven years has incubated the careers of hundreds of artists. The work of forty three artists has been represented in this show – This is Paradise: Cameron Culture.  However what you see here in the lobby of Theatre Passe Muraille is only the tip of the iceberg.

Cameron Culture: subsversive yet not subservient. This is the economy of Good Faith. All economy is false…

In “Art” We Trust.

LE MUSEE DE BEER

An accumulation of history manifests a museum; it is all in the mind. A lot of angst has been centered around what exactly constitutes a museum or art gallery in the last five years;  traditionally,  art curated outside the system or in the world somewhere is defined as being exhibited in a “museum without walls.”  Rather than moving forward in their careers and getting commercial dealers, they are forever friends of the public purse.

The original intent behind the museum without walls was to form a plastic environment that could satellite it’s projects in other spaces that would not be subservient to the financial and social-political pressures that a commercial gallery impresses upon young talent.  But the crème de la crème of the “alternative art gallery “ scene have created a bottle neck situation where it becomes damn near impossible for a young artist in Toronto to get this first show at a government gallery without some kind of nepotism or bureaucratic snarl in place. This is because the public galleries have taken on the job of the commercial gallery and developed its own stable of artists. The irony of this situation is that it is also “state controlled” and juried in nonsensical manners right out of George Orwell.

The question for the young artists or even in mid-career is “where do I show?”  This is because there is such as dire shortage of space and opportunity.  Which way is the wave of the future expected to roll when suddenly the making of your art is snarled up in juried systems that depend on funding from the government.

Instead of relying on the parallel gallery or public gallery art system and having your inspiration killed by the stench of social leveraging, obsessive compulsive narcissism and doublespeak it seems much more appealing to manifest your own museum without walls  in the space of a local business.

Opportunity on Queen Street is lapping at the doors of local public business; in the windows of bookstores such as Pages and in the cafes and bars. Places such as the Peter Pan, The Rivoli, The Bamboo, The Cameron, Lee’s Palace and The Diamond have become the new “serious” answer to the lack of public gallery space.  Since the alternative art gallery no longer reeks of spontaneity the way it used to in the late sixties and early seventies, the trend for the young artist is to show at night clubs.

This is nothing new… the original A Space on St. Nicholas St. started out as being a café in which the co-founder, Marion Lewis, served java up to artists. In New York, it is more than just a matter of course; it is prestigious to show along with the crème de la crème at nightclubs such as Palladium, Area, The Mud Club and Nell’s.

Sue Young, Napoleon Brousseau and Kenneth Baird, all of whom could be described as being Cameron Culture Spawned (they are no strangers to the Musee De Beer), have operated in curatorial capacities in New York in these nightclubs. Similarly, I have curated several massive shows at the Diamond Club here in Toronto, which is a night club about the size of Area in New York.

All of these three individuals, in fact were in a way, apprentices to “Philly from Philidelphia” who used to run Toxic Plan 9, a clothing store on Queen St. West which always had fabulous, visually renegade windows that seems to have inspired generations of similar witty punky looking window displays.

The facts have to be faced. Nightclubs offer exhibition space.  Artist-run spaces filled with boards of artists do not.  With the same breath with which they cry about the lack of documentation of history, they really do not want a curator or a catalogue around. They have sent us writers away so they can write their own damn history. The only problem there is, they never get around to it.

The truth of the Musee De Beer is already recognized in New York where the nightclub has long been legitimized as a venue for visual artists for about a decade now; in fact, Vanity Fair just published an article by Brad Goocg called Club Culture that digs the artist as “media star”.  The idea that an art show can be put together out of the annals of the unwritten history of The Musee De Beer, from somewhere like The Cameron Public House in Toronto, demonstrates the idea that there is a similar phenomenology going on in Canada — once again suggesting that the new art gallery space is “The Bar. “ I maintain the Cameron is living proof of that!

There is a great deal of work exhibited in The Cameron Public House that parodies, sometimes subconsciously, the kind of objects you would find in a museum. These are almost works of palaeotholgy.

Consider for example, Matt Harley’s paintings of dinosaurs; these paintings are a simultaneous distortion and appreciation of natural history. These storybook-like paintings hanging in the Cameron could literally could be found in the Royal Ontario Museum along with a nice little  tag that reads “Artist’s Conception of…”.

In the Musee De Beer, however, the application of such a curious past time (the reconstruction of boyish phantasms) becomes retro chic. This “model making” mentality is also evident in the work of Regan Morris whose Rhino Head Trophy is also included in this show. In this piece that was exhibited at the Cameron House this summer along with its companion Elephant Skin Paintings, Morris is reconstructing anatomically incorrect models of childhood memory.

The Musee De Beer also has its share of Folk Art including Rebecca Baird’s “treated” alligator hides and Handsome Ned’s hand painted silk handkerchiefs. Although primarily known for turning the Cameron Public House into “The Grand Ole Cameron” every Friday night by singing the “hurtin songs” as well as his own material, the late Handsome Ned was a talented cartoonist.

In many ways, Rebecca Baird’s neo-paleolithic “skins” pay a certain homage to the memory of Ned; this work is about the escalation of myth as it is deconstructed from language into symbol. Baird’s work is tattooed with a cult of memory that is personal as well as ancestral to the Cameron; juxtaposing the image of a Cowboy with the artist’s own heritage as Cree Indian.

Napoleon Brousseau’s giant Ants that grace the exterior of the Cameron Hotel exemplify the neo Paleolithic approach to art as well. The Ants are symbolist in nature; visually a form of concrete poetry. Psychically they are “good news; a metaphor for seamless, wordless communication.  Ants also “eat information.”  They clean flesh from the bones. On the face of the “Public House” the fact of their exterior decoration serves the same function as gargoyles and also is a form of social commentary on a place that on any given night is literally crawling with people: Information Eaters.

NIGHT CRAWLERS

Some of the most interesting visual matter to come out of the Cameron revolves around the mythology of the Nocturnal Wild Life. This kind of art is as obsessed with permutations of personal style as is the crowd that frequents the bar at night; wearing the personalized leather jackets, T-Shirt, hats and other items of clothing that are totemic to their personal inner city tribe of Cameron.  John Scott’s hand painted Killer Bunny leather jacket, A01’s Astroturf Pill Box Hat and the Fast Wurms Chew Or Die T-shirt are great examples of Cameron Fashion.

Even the piano, in the back room of the Cameron is not just any old piano; it is an I BrainEater piano. For this crowd, style is a “matter of faction” and this is often reflected in the startling images in the décor and the wall.

However, when thinking about the Nocturnal Wild Life that roams about the Cameron what immediately comes to mind is Andy Fabo’s signature exhibition of paintings that hung in the back room of the Cameron for several months; three of which are included in this show. One is the medieval reverie and celebration depicted in “Ye Olde Cameron.”  The second is a depiction of Tim Jocelyn, Andy Fabo and Jane Buyers “in costume” inside a circus ring; it is done in the colors of the devil (red and black.) There is a mania and carefree approach to this work that is a delirious appreciation of dancing on the very edge of experience; before Gay Related Immune Disorder and bathhouse raids signaled the end of the bacchanal.

Likewise, another work by Rae Johnson celebrates Andrew J. Paterson, the writer, performance and video artist who has resided at The Cameron Hotel since the takeover.  This painting is in essence a portrait, not only of Andrew, but also of that back room; the sinuous cords of the microhone and the hot steamy quality of the room on a summer’s night.

A similar painting by Rae, Denis and Friends captures that same kind of steaminess; the distortion of vision is related to the kind of paranoia suggested by the over consumption of alcohol. Perspective itself suffers from delirium tremens as it also does in the work of Derek Caines and Brian Burnett. The artist’s personal relationship with the hotel and its accompanying imagery extends itself subtextually as a kind of paranoia; the objects in the paintings of these artists seem to drown and blur as if they were being viewed through the puce glass of a pint of beer.

There is an image that Rae Johnson created, while living in Suite Sixteen in the hotel (also my room) of a phantom pair of lovers; the image has been reworked again and again in many of her paintings up until the present day. Sometimes the couple is swathed in darkness, sometimes seared in electricity; they allude to a room that has given up it’s dark secrets.

Singer and philanthropist Molly Johnson has functioned as a kind of resident curator for the visual art flowing in and out of the doors of the Cameron Hotel and is well known for her notorious attempts to satellite works that have been generated out of the Cameron environment into other spaces.

Her aborted Art Bar venture was a brave attempt to make the transition from “Saloon Art” to “Salon Art”.  The  event was busted by the cops. Apparently, Toronto was not ready for a sophisticated after-hours salon that markets art or such an intuitive curator.

The marketing of art becomes an Art itself, especially when we are talking about the infamous version of the limited edition print: the Street Poster. Included in this show are examples of this underrated form of “visual assault.”  Many of Molly Johnson’s gigs were celebrated by the drawings of Adley Gawad whose poster series for her ‘Blue Mondays”, a weekly event where Molly Johnson “torched it up in the back room accompanied by a lazy cigarette and her pianist Aaron Davis.

In the Wild West of Queen Street, posters have become big businesses.  Posters are at the heart of any thriving café society. There are many included in this exhibition from out of the personal collection of Herb Tookey; original street ads for the now defunct Government; David Hlynsky’s famous portrait of The Hummer Sisters (Deanne Taylor, Jennifer Dean and Janet Burke standing in front of Toronto City Hall during their Campaign for Mayor in 1982, and a highly totemic invitation contrived by The Fast Wurms to screen one of their experimental super 8 films in the back room in 1982.

A PRIVATE SHOW IN A PUBLIC HOUSE

People go to bars to watch and be watched. A landmark exhibition that dealt with the odd double life of this activity as it’s central theme was Eldon Garnet’s Cameron Public House Privacy which took place in the front room of the hotel in the summer of 1982. The show consisted of four large, “staged” allegorical photographs accompanied by a fable about “privacy.”  The photographs featured Robert Stewart as a model protagonist posing within a collection of menacing mise-en-scenes.

These photographs serve as windows into a mythological private life; the viewer finds himself playing the role of “peeper”; the secret life is revealed on the private stage to the voyeur.  With this type of art, the art of “looking” itself becomes a schizophrenic activity.  Privacy is invasive in the way it burns the intimate image into the mind.

The disclosure of a secret is also an erotic activity. Gluttony, masturbation and other such self-indulgent taboos are treated by Garnet with a nice fetish for the wide angle lens. These are shots portrayed with cold clincism; the viewer’s experience mimics peripheral neuritis.  Allusions to the relationship between beauty and pain become crystallized in each mise-en-scene; this is theatre trapped benaeath a Bell Jar.

At the same time, Eldon’s show was up, Isaac Applebaum was showing a selection of photographs in the back room of the Cameron that represented a different ideology. It too was a commentary about the idea of “watching.”  One wall featured black and white photographs of Lovers; the other snap shots of Boxers which were taken at Toronto’s Landsdowne Boxing Club.

Eldon’s photographs were very “staged”; embellished. Isaac’s photographs were “found artifacts”; journalism turned into fiction. Applebaum’s photographs relied on devices such as the close up and “the blur” for a sense of dramatic tension.   The unifying theme of the show was passion in which a relationship between love and violence is made but in this case the act of “watching passion” emerges as being a passive activity.  Both of these shows were about the intimate contact sport of watching and being watched.

Another noteworthy display of photography that took place in the back room was Jayce Salloum’s exhibiton of eight lurid color photographs featuring “stolen “ moments from film and television.

However at the pinnacle of the “artist as media voyeur” shock-and-talk movement was the work of David Buchan.  This most masterful manipulation of P.R is evident in Beautiful Black and Blue and Solitary Drinkers.

These staged tableaus featured local people like Herb Tookey, artist Oliver Girling and filmmaker Michelle Mclean and himself. He compounds an event into fiction by monopolizing the most economical form of fiction (advertising).

Buchan’s work states three truths; that all art is gossip, that all information is disinformation and that in the end all myth-making will inevitably be propaganda.

THE GARDEN OF DELIGHTS

A yearning to visualize a new Paradise or return to one is seen in the works of many of the painters in the Cameron “stable” of artists.

A real attempt to depict a kind of Eden is seen in the paintings of Adly Gawad whose work often deals with the act of making love. His work is narcissistic and sensual and possessed with a Zen-like clarity. There is a resolution of duality in the work between decoration and design; between male and female components.  Sexuality is escalated from its baser implications to states of purity, divinity and androgyny.

For Gawad, the language of love is non verbal; a pictograph. The “menace” in the work comes from the idea that the most dangerous of voyeurs is the one that looks the most closely at himself.

We also include here work by Lorne Wagman; part of his Garden Series that was exhibited in the back room at the Cameron two years ago. The act of creating a “landscape” is synergistic with the act of creating a cartography of the psyche; it is a geomancy of the mind and body. The lush sensuality of these paintings was in stark contrast to the organism-hostile environment of the Cameron itself in which nothing seems to grow but a drunken despair.

Perhaps the most intellectual treatment of the idea of the Garden, comes from a man obsessed with the “tyranny of the triangle”: A01 (Andrew 0wen) Rose, in itself represents the simplest form of a garden: It is a mandala that serves the multi-faceted purpose of being both a rose, a symbol of that rose and a map of a garden. It is basically a sculpture finding its center in the idea that the unnatural or “man-made” is by aesthetic definition actually – supernatural.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

Upstairs, the Cameron Hotel harbors resident artists, musicians and writers in individual Virginal Woolf type sanctuaries where in between bursts of inspiration they can be found contemplating the view such as the one I am looking at –“Just another bunch of lemmings …” spray painted on the cement wall across the street.

Included in this Paradise show is a poignant example of a landscape painted by Matt Harley, actually painted from inside my Suite 16. It depicts a rather bleak view of the alley behind Cameron Street and the “architorture” of the developing condos behind it.

The room with a view is not limited to four walls, especially if that space is inadequate or small (artists have an insurmountable housing problem in Toronto).  If you are an artist here the realization comes rapidly that “the world is your living room.”  The artist’s daily life must extend itself to the Great Canadian Outdoors; the café society of the street.

John Wilcox’s painting of performance artist and chef Gordon W. with his Chipati cart is a comment not only on the idea that “there is no place like home” but also on the persistence of such visions as Gordon W. selling his food; such sights become so familiar during daily life living at the Cameron that one seems to think they have scar tissue on their retina. Gordon W.’s saffron robed generous booming presence is an image indigenous to nowhere else on earth but Queen Street.

Brian Burnett paints omniscient arial views of the street from a hovering third person perspective. In a painting called Queen Street Expressway Burnett has captured the ambience of that “charmed spot” in front of the Rivoli café where everybody chains up their bikes outside the patio.  In Burnett’s work disembodied eyeballs surface from the pavement; the watched landscape watches back.

THE CHURCH OF THE CAMERON

A hotel can be a ruse for many metaphors. The Cameron Public House in its time has managed to mimic The Museum, The Art Gallery and The Theater. It has also functioned as Town Square, Circus, O.K. Corral, Asylum and Central Intelligence Agency.

Mankind’s original rather neurotic desire for entertainment is based on the need to belong to something greater than oneself.  We have a historical and ritualistic need for a place that symbolizes this need.

This is why many of the design elements that have incorporated into the physical entity that is the Cameron resembles the buttressing and endless flying detail found in Baroque style old churches.

Instead of religious festivals, the Cameron has art events. The remnants of the celebrations are then left and embedded almost ritualistically into the building.  An example of this type of “decoration” is the General Idea banner commemorating their show at the Art Gallery of Ontario two years ago.

The portals to this establishment have always been a very important of The Cameron’s façade. At the time of this writing the Fast Wurms have redone the face of the building; changing the regal purple of its armored front to a Provincial Park shade of orange.

Spray painted right-on the stop of the building is Tom Dean’s This is Paradise along with Napoleon Brousseau’s snakes.

If a Hotel is a Body then these artist marks are the tattoos. The Wurms also embedded a mattress, replete with mandatory chic Catholic fetishism and a huge skeletal hand ridden with stigmata in the front room.

Napoleon Brousseau’s famous white ants function as gargoyles on the outside; they are objects of curiosity and also loathing of the tourists that pass by. Inside , on the ceiling of the front room is Sybil Goldstein’s Go for Baroque parody of the Sistine Chapel. The three panels feature a heathen heaven with, twisted looking cherubs, clouds and horses all accomplished with mock Renaissance fervor.

The Cameron also has niches. Mark Harman and Katherine Nichols were commissioned by Herb to create pieces for the niches; the circular shaped arches up in the rafters of the front room that were part of the original architectural design. This series of plaques, constructed of plaster molding were semi-medieval and symbolist in nature.

In the upstairs bathroom one can relax and have a bath and meditate on the fresco on the wall done by Pauline Choi: the image of The Bather. There is also a hole in this bathroom floor through which one can behave like one of the voyeuristic subjects of a Brian Burnett painting and spy on the people in the bar downstairs.

THE WALLS OF THE CAVE

Over the years the dark interior of the Cameron Public House has looked like a metaphysical version of Plato’s cave. There is something very womblike about the walls inside. However no discussion of the Cameron Public House could be complete without a look at the many murals that have embellished the exterior of the eastern wall facing out onto Cameron Street. These murals are like landmarks and perform the similar linguistic functions that drawing did in caves; often the work has taken on the form of the pictograph pointing to the subversive secret life of artists.

In the past couple of years, the murals have included volcano painting by Brian Video, a collaborative piece between Sheilagh Alexander, Joanne Todd, Sandra Meigs and Elizabeth McKenzie which was emblazoned with the slogan “Out of the Studios and into the Streets!”; one of A01s wooden chicken wire De Fences: a painting by Brian Burnett of a dog sitting by a fire hydrant; paintings by Alan Glicksman and John Abrams; a collaboration between Rae Johnson and Derek Caines; a Michael Merrill and images by Runt, Peter Dako and Gar Smith.  Around the back of the building was a piece by Adly Gawad that told with acute X ray vision of the dark sexual scenario taking place inside.

The new wall which is being created as I write this (travelling northward) features a tropical scene by Adly Gawad; a painting by Kurt Swinghammer and cartoons by Barb Klunder, Wendy Coad and Erella Vent, John Abrams and and Rae Johnson.  Many of these murals were like X-ray vision snap shots into the rooms of the building.

THE BANK OF CAMERON

There have been a number of artistic scams take place at the Cameron; (Jean Genet will tell you about the relationship between artists and criminals).

Artists traditionally deal with the Bank of Time; they deal in goods. The bar of the Cameron at certain points does resemble a gift shop featuring such curios as the Bunch of Fucking Goofs Limited Edition How to Blow Up  a GlueHead book of matches, Fast Wurms objects of worship, invitations to party rooms all over the city, records and tapes from local musicians, books of poetry etc.

However, included in this exhibition we have Herb Tookey’s Cameron Money Fivers From Heaven. Bills (pretty pieces of paper) were redeemable with local businesses and designed by Rae Johnson and Derek Caines.

This “tender matter” is more than your usual discount coupon; it is an exercise in faith. As Herb Tookey explains – “The only thing behind Cameron currency is trust. In Art We Trust.”

In “Art We Trust” is on every Fiver From Heaven. This is also a good example of how art turns ordinary business men into curators!

THIS IS PARADISE

However perhaps the simplest, most iconic expression of the essence of the Cameron Hotel and what it means to all of the artists, performers and writers that have lived there over the years is Tom Dean’s simple iconic statement- “This is Paradise”.

It is a seminal art piece that is responsible for a kind of permissiveness that has allowed so many artists, including myself to produce and create work based on the idea that Queen Street West did once have a thriving utopian community that grew in the darkness of this dank yet so inspiring broken down palace of a Victorian watering hole I call sanctuary and home.

Donna Lypchuk

Suite 16 of the Cameron Hotel,

Toronto, 1987

DONNA LYPCHUK is a Canadian columnist, critic, curator and playwright who lived at the Cameron Hotel for almost a decade. Lypchuk was one of the co-curators of the original This is Paradise painting exhibition that took place in October 1987 in the lobby of Theater Passe Muraille.