This text by SHANNON ANDERSON was published alongside JAIME ANGELOPOULOS’ The Thief in Your Sleeve exhibition.

As I stood with Jaime Angelopoulos inside her studio, it was admittedly difficult to concentrate. Trains of thought kept running away from me, questions on the tip of my tongue suddenly dissipated from memory. Initially, I chalked it up to the relatively tight quarters of her cube-shaped studio, tucked into the back corner of an industrial warehouse. At the time, the room seemed as much a storehouse as a studio, with sculptures and drawings occupying most of the available wall and floor space. Angelopoulos and I carefully shuffled around them as we spoke about the work she planned to exhibit in The Thief in Your Sleeve. It wasn’t until I left the studio, then realizing that I somehow neglected to take snapshots of her work and record our discussion, that the real source of this discomfort became apparent: the sculptures themselves held the crux of my problem. As they surrounded us, each one had been speaking in competition with the others, simultaneously pulling for attention. Despite their deceptively simple, colourful and nearly abstract forms, each held within a distinctive personality that insisted on acknowledgement. Slippery and clever, Angelopoulos’ sculptures have an uneasy way of burrowing up your sleeve and getting under your skin.

Standing in the midst of all those sculptures emphasized how much space each one really requires. It wasn’t surprising to learn that only four pieces will fill the gallery at YYZ: The Big Reveal, a wooden theatre curtain of sorts destined for ruby-red flocking; Prick, a wall-mounted piece comprised of a grid of hooks; Like Air & Water, a tipsy, stick-like structure with two yellow balloon-shaped heads; and He Moved Just So, a piñata-esque royal-blue shaggy figure that wielded peculiar command in the studio.

The other sculptures residing in the studio that day were in various stages of completion. A multi-limbed creature veered up in front of us as though in attack mode. Although still in raw plaster, ready to be flocked, painted or layered in fabric, Angelopoulos had already named it Stand up for Yourself. Behind it, a lumpy odalisque draped in strands of bright orange fabric, You, You’re a Luminous Being, seemed to strain for breath beneath layers of wrapped plastic, having recently returned from an exhibition. Finally, a robust baby-blue figure, Just Passing Through, resided in the back corner of the room, its bulky body suggesting a wrestler depicted in a hybrid cubist/futurist/video game style and curiously sporting a peg-leg. There wasn’t a quiet work in the bunch, and the unexpected oddities –such as the peg-leg– were the very things that amplified their presence. The suggestive titles that Angelopoulos lends to each one drapes them in further layers of intrigue, always leaving enough open to lure a viewer in close.

Angelopoulos says that the figurative element in her sculptures is a gradual progression in her work, that the representational allusions within her otherwise abstract forms are a recent phenomenon. Her current exploration of the fertile territory between figuration and abstraction is significant, as it shifts her practice toward a particular lineage of female sculptors. Her recent work recalls shades of sculptures by Meret Oppenheim, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith. Not surprisingly, curator Lesley Johnstone listed this same lineage in comparison to Montreal sculptor Valérie Blass, whose work shares particular affinities with Angelopoulos’ recent work. Although Blass’ practice is quite distinct in her incorporation of seemingly banal objects as assemblage, her figurative sculptures resonate with a comparably unsettling sensation for viewers. Johnstone notes that Blass “navigates the terrain between figuration and abstraction, the recognizable and the indeterminate, the declared and the evoked, in order to create a duality that is charged with potential.”[i] And although one can make an occasional parallel with Blass’ material choices, such as flocking (seen in Blass’ Comme dans l’an quarante, 2011) or fringed fabric (L’homme paille, 2008), it is this state of charged potential within her work that holds a distinctive resonance with Angelopoulos’ practice.

The potency within Angelopoulos’ sculptures fully comes to the fore through the interplay with the viewer. By looking closer and injecting our own interpretations, we inevitably tighten the contours of their otherwise ambiguous forms. In other words, the way we feel about each object says much about us, and that’s where things get slippery. There’s a confrontational aspect to Prick, for instance, in the jutting hooks that simultaneously nudge us closer while threatening to grab hold. The title might be viewed as simple word play at first glance, but it also harbours an accusatory tone –just who does Prick represent, exactly? Are we meant to recall the nasty customer we watched hurling insults at a timid shopkeeper, or does it point to something closer to home, the spite within ourselves? And what does it say about the viewer when He Moved Just So, a blue snufalufagus that by all initial appearances seems playful and unaffected, over time shifts in feeling toward something irritatingly passive and ominously weighted?

A primal quality resides within these works, whose forms are by turns thick and cumbersome, as though they are just beginning to take shape, or fragile and overworked, as though they are one manipulation away from collapsing. The bright, primary colours that monochromatically cover each surface might first appear somewhat childlike, but the bold colouration also lends them a particular power, and the balance between the two reveals an underhanded, deceptive quality.

Does the manner in which these sculptures needle at our subconscious suggest that we in the presence of tricksters at work? Carl Jung describes the classic trickster archetype as “a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually.”[ii] Cunning and foolish on the surface, the trouble-making trickster serves the keen role of revealing our faults to ourselves, thereby helping us to acknowledge and understand our true nature with greater complexity. The trickster is also known as the shape-shifter, and the forms that Angelopoulos creates tellingly contain this very amorphous, undefined quality.

Literature professor Helen Lock puts a particular spin on the trickster phenomenon by attempting to define its postmodern incarnations: “A new age brings a transmutation and a new repertoire of tricks. In fact, we may now have reached the stage of ultimate ambiguity … when all possibilities can be both entertained and discounted, and tricksters become so elusive that they disappear…”[iii] One might consider the particular, charged ambiguity that resides within Angelopoulos’ sculptures to be the trickster in its contemporary form, one that finds its power at the edges of our subconscious as it subtly, parasitically, points toward our insecurities.

In the presence of these sculptures, what appears innocuous or humorous at first glance is, ultimately, disarming. Move in too closely, and they may reveal the tricks you’re hiding. Ulterior motives and surface appearances are all suddenly laid out on the table. Within these clumsy forms and weak structures lies the roots of inadequacy and insecurity, both within us and within everyone who passes by. Consider this fair warning: you may not be ready to expose the thief in your sleeve.

SHANNON ANDERSON is an independent writer and curator based in Oakville, Ontario. She has written essays for publications produced by galleries across Canada, such as the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, the Koffler Gallery, Oakville Galleries, and the Textile Museum of Canada, and has contributed to various art and design magazines, including Art Papers, Azure, C Magazine, Canadian Art, and Eyemazing. Her current curatorial projects include (Da bao)(Takeout), an international touring exhibition of work from China and Canada circulated by the Varley Art Gallery of Markham.

OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY 04 MAY 2012, 8PM – 10PM

Libby Hague’s installation is to be viewed as a psychological self-portrait that traces patterns of influence as they move between creative life and private life. The themes that often recur in Hague’s work –risk and luck, disaster and rescue– are transposed into an approximate timeline of the complicated and contradictory textures of her life. Here is the beginning; the forgotten things; the boredom; the family dynamics; the accidents; the patterns; the nightmares; the sex; the love; the fun.

The exhibition will consist of an immersive woodcut installation including the Toronto premier of Hague’s pleated paper structures. In addition, abstract puppet sculptures will be suspended from tracks on the ceiling. These puppets are to be reconfigured by the gallery audience, moving around but never going away, accumulating like our personal history.

Part creature and part object, the puppets are made to stand and sit. Then they stand and sit again, in a “lower-case” ideal of continued effort.  By moving them, we give them a half-life that engenders in us a strange empathy and impatience. They test our patience with their repeated and almost inevitable failures; they test our optimism with their inability to learn or show gratitude. Together they speak to the isolation and interconnection of beings.

As part of the YYreZidency program, the lengthy duration of the show will allow for several interventions and performances to take place within the gallery; the anticipated super-energy combo of sculptural drama and live human performance. The interventions/performances are scheduled for Saturday afternoons from 1:00pm-3:00pm with open rehearsals happening any time during regular gallery hours. A variety of documentation will be made and presented as a small video series through the social media outlet YouTube.

May 26 | Philip Anisman reads from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace 
June 2 | Catherine Carmichael, experimental dance and performance artist
June 9 | Erica Iris – vocal (mezzo-soprano)    
June 16 | Andrea Cerswell – vocal (soprano)
June 23 | Zoja Smutny, experimental dance and performance artist
June 30 | Maev Beaty, performance with spoken word

LIBBY HAGUE is a Toronto-based visual artist who works primarily in print installation. She recently held solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, ON), Galerie Circulaire (Montreal, QC),  La Centrale (Montreal, QC), the Durham Art Gallery (Durham, ON), and at the Art Gallery of Mississauga (Mississagua, ON). She has traveled internationally to install her work in the International Paper Art Exhibition and Symposium, Chung Shan National Gallery (Taipei, TW), Miner for a heart, curated by Yael Brotman for Impact 7 (Melbourne, AU), and for IPCNY’s New Prints 2011/Autumn (New York City, USA). Hague was the recipient of the 2009 Open Studio National Printmaking Award. She is represented in many public collections including the Musée du Québec , Confederation Center, Anderson Collection, University of Buffalo, Bank of Montreal and the Donovan Collection at the University of Toronto. www.libbyhague.com

JAIME ANGELOPOULOS | THE THIEF IN YOUR SLEEVE

Jaime Angelopoulos presents a new body of sculptures exploring figuration and gesture through abstract form. Angelopoulos’ sculptures are relational in scale to the human body, often evoking a figure in motion, or metaphorically, they allude to a heightened emotional state. Colour, texture, and form become emotive layers within each work, while narrative based titles invite the viewer’s participation, infusing ambiguous forms with personal meaning.

JAIME ANGELOPOULOS received her MFA from York University (2010), and BFA from NSCAD University (2005). She completed Post Baccalaureate studies at Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, TX (2006-07), and an artist residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2006). Angelopoulos works primarily as a sculptor, but also creates large-scale drawings. Her sculptures are constructed primarily in fabric, plaster, and found objects. Angelopoulos has presented solo exhibitions at Parisian Laundry (Montreal, QC), Stride Gallery (Calgary, AB), Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax, NS), Meadows School of the Arts (Dallas, TX), and The Banff Center for the Arts (Banff, AL).  Her works are included in the collections of The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ALDO Group, York University, BMO, as well as private collections. Angelopoulos is represented by Parisian Laundry in Montreal. She lives and works in Toronto.

Jaime Angelopoulos gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Read SHANNON ANDERSON‘S Jaime Angelopoulos: The Trickster Within, an essay about JAIME ANGELOPOULOS‘ exhibition.

Still On, JACOB HORWOOD: Detail Without A Drawing Board, show runs until July 21, 2012.

Location | 140-401 Richmond St. W Toronto, 0N M5V 3A8
Gallery Hours | Tuesday-Saturday 11:00am-5:00pm

OPENING RECEPTION | SATURDAY 14 APRIL 2012, 2PM-5PM
In partnership with the 25th Images Festival.

Strange Lines and Distances is a two-channel audiovisual installation focusing on Guglielmo Marconi’s first transatlantic radio broadcast. The work is inspired by Marconi’s belief that sound never diminishes, but rather grows incrementally fainter and fainter. He believed that with an adequately sensitive receiver, one could amplify the echoes of history. Strange Lines and Distances looks at and listens to the past, revisiting Marconi’s original transmission sites in order to explore the hauntological aspects of radio and landscape. The installation invites a consideration of the monumental impact of the first wireless transmission, and explores the medium’s potential to conflate and fragment both space and time. Strange Lines and Distances takes its title from a passage in Francis Bacon’s utopian text New Atlantis, in which Bacon imagines a futuristic society’s culture, politics, history and media. In contradistinction, Strange Lines and Distances moves backwards, retrospectively exploring the invention of radio while looking for echoes and historical intimations of the past within the present.

Strange Lines and Distances’ dual channels represent the transmission site in Poldhu Cove, U.K. and the receiving site at Fever Hospital, St. John’s, NL. Each historical site is documented using 16mm colour negative film. The sonic composition was created from site-specific field recordings, shortwave and longwave radio recordings and archival material. Mired in static and atmospheric interference, the recordings exist as fragmentary spectres of outport beacons, noise, musical passages and human voice. Visually, each channel contains imagery that resonates and rhymes with the opposing channel in terms of shape, line, colour, light and optical geometry. Through a visual examination of the sites’ topographical similarities, the work plays with the juxtaposition of landscape, architectural ruins, flora, and geological and meteorological phenomena. The images unfold as a series of long shots, and this play with duration creates a montage that asks the spectator to consider distance and the poetics of form.

JOSHUA BONNETTA is an artist working with film, video and sound in various modes of theatrical exhibition, performance and installation. His work has been shown within North and South America, the UK, Europe, Russia and South Korea. He is the 2009 recipient of the National Film Board of Canada’s Best emerging/mid-career Canadian filmmaker award from the Images Festival.

Location | 140-401 Richmond St. W Toronto, 0N M5V 3A8
Gallery Hours | Tuesday-Saturday 11:00am-5:00pm

AT OUR ARTIEST: PEDAGOGICAL EXPLORATIONS INTO THE ITHYPHALLIC RUMINATIONS OF KEVIN HAINEY

YYZ is pleased to announce the launch of our newly improved Membership Program. To celebrate, YYZ is hosting a special event featuring some of Toronto’s most creative sound artists: FORKTINE, GASTRIC FEMALE REFLEX, and M.STACTOR.
 
SATURDAY 21 APRIL 2012
DOORS OPEN | 7:00PM
ADMISSION  | FREE
* One-night only: Receive a free limited edition t-shirt designed by Jacob Horwood with the purchase of a YYZMEMBERSHIP.

Twenty-first century experimental composition. Both hat and hatless performance. Instrument building and the act of dropping it on the way to the gig. The spirit of forgetting your sheet music only to call it indeterminism. Crash course in clown sounds, by the graduating class of the BBC Radiophonic workshop of non-unionized plagiarists. Presented by Old MacDonald Had A Farm at half speed.

FORKTINE  | 8:00PM
FORKTINE is a noise/musique concrète project based in Toronto, Canada. Though not exclusively a solo project, Forktine was instigated and organized by Colin Hinz. The project formed as an outgrowth from Hinz’ history of building unusual, one-of-a-kind musical instruments that began in the late 1980s. These instruments have various forms, borrowing from historic mechanical musical instruments, junkyard or toy parodies of contemporary instruments, circuit-bending, mechanical gadgetry, and plain-old electronics engineering. In addition to the Forktine project, Hinz has used these instruments in numerous performances with the improvisational ensembles Six Heads and The Urban Refuse Group, and has documented their construction in the journal Experimental Musical Instruments.

GASTRIC FEMALE REFLEX | 8:45PM
GASTRIC FEMALE REFLEX was started out of necessity –to punctuate awkward expanses and embarrassed silences– pecking at them with lugubrious beaks and soft spit marmalade, the sound of shitty winds through dildo trees. It began under strenuous circumstances –near strangers in cramped subterranean dwellings, nowhere to sit but the bed (on top of the sheets)– groping, bewildered in the sonic darkness of a monolithic uncertainty, and admittedly, inadequacy. Though, for all their shortcomings as musicians, they still succeeded in producing over 30 albums worth of manic, rollicking, often insufferable gesticulations on a host of international labels. Once upon a time they had toured Europe extensively and performed at several festivals where they were unilaterally ignored. These days, every show is their last. Once every couple of months Jacob Horwood and Andrew Zukerman will rise from their convalescent beds, dust off their reel to reels and subject themselves to the torture of being in a band that sounds like shit. Eventually it will die a quiet death, be buried with its stupid name and nobody will be the wiser. RIP GFR.

M.STACTOR | 9:30PM
M.STACTOR  (W.A.Davison) is a multi-disciplinary artist originally from Nova Scotia. He studied fine art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and experimental music at Dalhousie University. His work has been exhibited, performed, and presented at numerous Canadian and International festivals. As a musician, composer, improviser, and instrument-builder, Davison has appeared in hundreds of performances as both a solo artist and in various groups and ad hoc collectives. His recorded work spans close to thirty years and has been distributed on small labels, through informal networks around the world. He remains a true experimentalist and a stalwart proponent of independent/DIY music production and dissemination. Davison has been a prominent member of Toronto’s improvising, noise, and experimental music communities since the early 90′s. He has received support from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Davison has been living and working in Toronto since 1989.

YYZ IS PLEASE TO HOST IN CONVERSATION | THE CURATOR’S IMAGE
FRIDAY 20 APRIL 2012
 7:00PM-9:00PM
ADMISSION | FREE

Christopher Regimbal | Exhibition Coordinator, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
cheyanne turions | Independent Curator
Leah Turner | Associate, Jessica Bradley Art + Projects
Yan Wu | Programme Director, Gendai Gallery
Moderated by:
Lucas Soi | Director/Curator, Soi Fischer

Recent public dialogues such as The Curatorial Today, Art Basel (2011); Are Curators Unprofessional?, The Banff Centre (2010); and Curators In Context, ARCCO (2005) have established national and international conversations around the practical, theoretical and conceptual approaches to contemporary curatorial practice.  The Curator’s Image seeks to do the same on a local level, providing a vehicle for conversation between emerging professionals who curate contemporary art in Toronto as part of institutional, commercial, artist-run and independent platforms.

Location | 140-401 Richmond Street W. Toronto, ON  M5V 3A8
Gallery Hours | Tuesday-Saturday, 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM

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.

OPENING RECEPTION | FRIDAY 06 JANUARY 2012, 8:00PM-10:00PM

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.

Location | 140-401 Richmond St. W Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
Gallery Hours | 11:00am-5:00pm

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.

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

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.

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.