Art Book Week Events at YYZ

Art Book Week Events at YYZ

Launch of YYZBOOKS’ most recent publication What is our Role? Artists in Academia and the Post-Knowledge Economy edited by Jaclyn Meloche Ph.D.

Friday 6 July, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
At YYZ | 140-401 Richmond Street West

Inspired by her own experiences of having to select a professional identity as an emerging scholar, editor Jaclyn Meloche asks the question What is our Role? While interdisciplinary practices and arts-based research within academia—commonly named “research-creation”—is not particularly new, nor revolutionary, visual art departments and art history departments within North American universities often perpetuate monodisciplinary models of pedagogy within their curriculums and mandates. With

very few exceptions, faculty in each department often exemplify discipline-specific practitioners working either in painting, sculpture, photography, or art history. But what happens when a painter is also an art historian? Or when a curator is also a

performance artist? Or better yet, when an artist is also a writer? While these intertwined identities do exist, and arts-based research has started to earn recognition

within academic and governmental granting agencies, limited spaces have in fact been carved out for the practice of research-creation within university departments.

What is our Role?: Artists in Academia and the Post-Knowledge Economy brings to the page a selection of inspired negotiations of the role of the artist in academia by four artist-scholars. While narrated through the lens of the practitioner, each chapter in this publication responds to the question: What is at stake for artists with Ph.D.’s in academia today?

Sharing a variety of entangled identities, Jaclyn Meloche, Dave Kemp, Natalie Doonan, Taien Ng-Chan, and Ryan Stec are invested in proposing new understandings of arts-based research vis-à-vis knowledge production as well as creating new spaces in which to produce knowledge within the institution through material and philosophical negotiations of research-creation.

 

Biography

Jaclyn Meloche completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Humanities (Fine Arts) at Concordia University in 2015. Her dissertation, Materials Matter: The Politics of Posthumanist Performativity in Contemporary Studio Practice, narrates a philo-sophical complication of materials in a studio practice through a posthumanist performative framework: a theoretical model through which to re/negotiate material agency in contemporary visual culture. She is co-curator of the touring exhibition Alma, presented by the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Varley Art Gallery, the Judith and Norman ALIX Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Windsor. In the role of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Windsor, her projects include The Sandwich Project (2017), Downtown/s – Urban Renewal Today for Tomorrow, The 2017 Windsor-Essex Triennial of Contemporary Art (2017), Isabelle Hayeur: Corps étranger/Foreign Body (2017), The Sandwich Project (2018), Deicing/Decolonizing: Hockey Histories in Canadian Contemporary Art (2019), and Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive (2019). Meloche is the author of “Milk Does the Body” in Immersive Performance: Engaging the Audience (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks) and “Camera Performed: Visualizing the Behaviours of Technology in Digital Performance” in Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Forthcoming book chapters include “The Politics of Perception: Re/Constructing Meaning Inside the Frame of War” in Surveillance, Race and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and “Houses, Homes and the Horrors of a Suburban Identity Politic” in Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She is a practicing artist and member of the Humanities Research Group’s Board of Directors at the University of Windsor.

 

Zine-Making Workshop lead by Sheila Sampath from The Public

Saturday 7 July, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
At YYZ | 140-401 Richmond Street West

The Public uses popular education and participatory design to re-distribute and re-imagine power, and has facilitated workshops on several topics, including textile design, anti-oppression, and consent. The Public has a “do it yourself” spirit and brings together these efforts as much as possible to engage in sustained social change.

In this three-hour workshop, participants will be introduced to the practice of zine-making and conditional design; an adaptive, game-based process of analogue visualization that uses input, logic and creativity to respond to environmental changes. Through discussions and small group activities, Sheila will propose idealized and speculative conditions, resulting in new visualizations that imagine a more just and equitable future for all people.

Limited space available on a first-come, first-served basis.

 

Biography

Sheila Sampath is an educator and an activist designer, who has been crafting creative for social good since 2003. Former chair of the board of directors at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multi-cultural Women Against Rape, she has a background in grassroots activism and organizing which she incorporates into her strategic approach to graphic design and popular education as Principal and Creative Director at The Public. She is the Editorial and Art Director of the award-winning Shameless — Canada’s feminist voice for young women and trans youth, teaches in the faculty of design at OCAD University and serves on the board of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre.

Sheila holds a honours diploma in graphic design from the George Brown College School of Design and an Honours BSc. in Sociology and Psychology from the University of Toronto. Her work as a designer has been recognized and awarded by the School of Design, the Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario, and the UTNE reader, and has received international recognition for community impact.

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

YYZCAMP

YYZCAMP

Weekly art-making summer camp for ages 8 to 12 at one of Toronto’s oldest artist-run gallery located in the historic 401 Richmond building.

Limited space available, so register now!

 

July 23 – July 27 | $300

Week 1: Paper Pirate Party – Join us as a seafarer and sail the seven seas this week exploring the many exciting uses of paper in artmaking. Create your own parrot partner from papier mache, make rustic treasure maps, and race custom designed pirate ships in the open waters of creativity!

July 30th – Aug 3 | $300

Week 2: Fantasy in Form and Fables – Live in a fantasy this week as kings and queens of your own self-made castles. Learn the basics of sculptural forms as we seek out adventurous quests to make our own 3D monster masks, dragon marionettes, and pixie wings, all while being immersed in storytelling magic.

Aug 7th – 10 | $240

Week 3: Galactic Travels in Composition – Blast into space this week exploring new worlds while mastering the art of painting and drawing allowing your imagination to come alive through oil resist alien paintings, print your way through the cosmos, and create your own tissue paper planet lanterns. Enhance your drawing skills through live astronaut life drawing. All this and more through one black hole journey into the galaxy of composition.

Aug 13th – Aug 17 | $300

Week 4: Around the world in 5 days – Inspired by globetrotting and the diverse cultures around the world take a plane ride with us this week while we seek out new countries through an arts and crafts explosion. Learn to make Indonesian shadow puppets, get inspired by Japanese indigo tie dying, travel with us to the continent of Africa where you’ll make a personalized mancala game board, and get festive with Mexican inspired paper picados. Pack your bags and get ready for a whirlwind adventure!

Camp runs from 9am to 5pm with available early drop off (8-9 am) and pick up (5-5:30) at an additional charge of $50 per week. Please select the “Extended Hours” option to your basket to register for early drop off and late pick up.

Activities will be held in suite 139.

YYZCAMP does not allow registration for children outside the 8 to 12 age range.

Campers must provide their own nut-free lunches and snacks.

There is no transportation provided.

A maximum of 20 children will be enrolled in the camp per week under the supervision of three facilitators. Facilitators have a minimum of an undergraduate degree in the visual arts with additional pedagogic early childhood education and/or experience. Facilitators hold CPR training and have presented a clear Police Record Check.

Outdoor play is scheduled at St. Andrew’s Playground or Grange Park. Gallery tours will occur at 401 Richmond St. W otherwise noted at the beginning of camp week.

401 Richmond Street West is an accessible building.

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

Rita Letendre: Toronto Public Art by Adam Lauder

This text by Adam Lauder was published alongside RITA LETENDRE‘S YYretroZpective exhibition, Toronto Public Art.

Rita Letendre
Toronto Public Art
By Adam Lauder

For years, Rita Letendre’s public art cut radiant vectors across Toronto’s urban grid. After decades living in Montréal and California, the artist had relocated to Toronto in November 1969.[1] Through a combination of public and private commissions for monumental murals and large-scale canvases, she quickly made her mark on the notoriously generic public spaces of her adoptive hometown.[2] By the decade’s close, her signature “arrow” paintings—iridescent, hard-edge abstractions—were a daily sight for thousands of Torontonians. Yet through a combination of misadventure and neglect, Letendre’s once ubiquitous and cherished public art works began to disappear, beginning with Sunrise(1971), her dazzling, seven-floor mural for Ryerson’s Neill-Wycik residence, which was permanently obscured when an adjacent 25-story residential tower was erected in 1978,[3] leaving only a 10-inch gap between the two buildings.

The titular sunrise of Letendre’s luminous mural may be a nod to her Indigenous heritage, her mother being of Abenaki/Québécois ancestry. “Dawn is special to the Wabanaki [a Confederacy of five northeastern nations including the Abenaki],” notes scholar and tribal member Jeanne Morningstar Kent, “because we are the ‘People of the Dawnland’,” where sunlight first reaches North America each morning.[4] Other Toronto-area public art works by Letendre, notably Tecumseth (1972) and Irowakan(1977), likewise gesture toward this personal history. Duane Linklater, a contemporary artist of Omaskêko Cree heritage whose projects excavate subterranean narratives of Indigenous presence and resilience, has recently interpreted the disappearance of Letendre’s public art as a symptom of Indigenous peoples’ historic dispossession.[5] Yet the artist is wary of being pigeonholed, or misrepresented by non-Indigenous commentators.[6] When asked about her identity, she has responded evasively “I am myself, Rita.”[7]

Wanda Nanibush, Curator, Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, has argued persuasively for recovering Letendre’s Indigenous roots, tracing the artist’s high-contrast palette and recurring arrow and wedge motifs to “a long Indigenous lineage of abstraction.”[8] Notably, Letendre’s hard-edge paintings radiate an “endless dualism”[9] reminiscent of the symmetrical foundations of Abenaki art.[10] Interpreted through an Indigenous lens, Letendre’s signature arrow motif might symbolize “direction.”[11]

The artist’s explosive vectors are every bit the trajectories of a dawning space age as they are the enduring signposts of non-Cartesian terrestrial wayfinding practices: “[With the arrow paintings] I was influenced by going to the moon, going into space,” she recalls in a new video interview recorded for the exhibition that this text accompanies, adding that “When we started going into space, I got so excited.”[12] This celestial orientation aligns Letendre’s arrow paintings with a broader “1960s ‘cosmic’ zeitgeist” associated with the experimental films of Michael Snow and the visionary media speculations of Marshall McLuhan, thus situating Letendre as an important precursor of more recent Indigenous futurisms.[13] If 1960s’ artists’ cosmic aspirations were symptomatic of a generational quest for identity, the “one-way trip” described by Letendre’s ballistic abstractions anticipate the unilateral orientation of the artist theorized by contemporary non-philosopher François Laruelle, whose “non-aesthetics” rejects the specular politics of representation.[14] Laruelle instead postulates a conjugation of disparate materials resonant with Letendre’s circumvention of categories.

Fittingly, forSunforce (1965), her first outdoor mural, Letendre employed an epoxy paint reserved, until then, “mainly for spacecraft engines.”[15] Her choice of a non-traditional medium may have been influenced by the mural’s locale: California State University, Long Beach being situated at the centre of a then burgeoning aerospace industry.[16] Fortuitously (as it turned out), neither epoxy nor the formidable scale of the 7 x 6-metre Sunforce would support the impastoed facture that had been a trademark of Letendre’s foregoing abstractions, forcing a technical breakthrough that cleared a path for the crisp edges and uniform paint application of the subsequent arrow paintings.[17]

Letendre was invited to produce Sunforcein conjunction with the 1965 California International Sculpture Symposium, a ground-breaking event whose artist-industry partnerships cleared a path for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s renowned Art & Technology Program, whose contributors were likewise chosen by curator Maurice Tuchman. It may have been the participation of Kosso, Letendre’s sculptor husband, that first brought her into Tuchman’s sphere, but she shared the curator’s fascination with science and technology: “If I had not been a painter,” she reflects, “I would have been a scientist”; adding, “if I had had money to go to university.”[18] Growing up in an impoverished family of seven on the outskirts of Drummondville, Québec, a university education was, however, sadly out of the question.[19]

Perhaps the artist’s attraction to new media and techniques—from epoxy paint to computer aided design and drafting software—can be traced to her father’s work as an auto mechanic. (Letendre recalls that her father, who was of Mohawk/Québécois ancestry, “wanted to be French.”)[20] Whatever the case may be, an accident in her father’s auto shop proved life-altering: mangling one of her fingers, and sending the young Letendre to stay with her maternal grandparents for a period of convalescence that ended up lasting several years.[21] (This injury also prevented her from studying piano, thereby forcing the artist to channel her lifelong passion for music into her painting.) Letendre recalls a subsequent childhood incident, while picking strawberries at her grandmother’s home, as decisive in shaping her worldview:

I was with my mother picking strawberries in a field in the country, and a storm started, and it became [a] thunder[storm]. It was not far away from my grandmother’s home, and so we went to my grandmother’s home. And I was terrified. And grandmother show[ed] me the beauty of it: instead of being afraid, to admire and love it. And I think she was certainly one of the most important thing[s] in my life. Never be afraid. See thing[s] as they are.[22]

This dramatic event ignited a tireless inquiry into the nature of things that may account for the more prominent sense of structure evident in Letendre’s early paintings compared to those of fellow second-generation Automatistes (followers of the revolutionary non-figurative painter and anti-clerical pamphleteer, Paul-Émile Borduas). It was Letendre’s keen plastic sense that brought her to the attention of Rodolphe de Repentigny, the chief theorist of the rival Plasticien movement, who signed his own canvases under the nom de plumeJauran. De Repentigny was an early and eloquent champion of the emerging painter. Yet today the artist is quick to distance herself from his geometric Neo-Plasticism, with its roots in the austere modernism of Piet Mondrian: “I reinterpret[ed] geometry … I’m using structure, but not geometry.”[23] As Anne-Marie Ninacs emphasizes, Letendre “remained faithful to the teachings of Paul-Émile Borduas,”[24] an ardent proponent of “spontan[eity],”[25] even if she soon broke with his gesturalist technique.

Art historian Sandra Paikowsky notes that the artist’s production of the late 1950s was emblematic of the new spirit of “pluralism” which pervaded the post-Automatiste generation;[26] but Letendre’s synthesis of Automatiste gesturalism and Plasticien form was always singular.[27] Her early disrespect for limiting labels set the stage for an exploration of Zen philosophy, whose kōans­—cryptic exchanges between master and student intended to provoke satori, or enlightenment—explode the dualistic constraints of conventional logic. Zennist non-duality may have offered Letendre a framework for negotiating her lived experience of cultural hybridity, as she explored aerospace imagery and materials in parallel with her Indigenous cultural inheritance.[28]

Rejecting static symmetry, Letendre’s arrows define a non-dual “parallelism”[29] that explodes the parallel postulate undergirding Euclidean space. Like certain cut-out paintings by Jackson Pollock, the dazzling iridescence of Letendre’s arrows stages a liberatory “tearing” of the modernist grid.[30] The vibratory rays of her hard-edge paintings recall Borduas’s relentless pursuit of “the infinity of everything.”[31]

Two of Letendre’s most significant public art works—Sunforceand Joy, her 1978 skylight for Glencairn subway station in Toronto—suggest analogies with the “gateless gate” invoked by Paul Reps’s classic anthology of Zen parables, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (1957), as a metaphor for the kōan­ as a gateway to enlightenment requiring active audience participation.[32] Writing in reference to Sunforce, which is sited on an elevated crosswalk between buildings on the Long Beach campus of the California State University, Letendre has commented that,

I chose the wall over the passageway because I want people walking in and out of my painting. It must not be static—it must be dynamic with action and an interaction that continues in the mind of the spectator.[33]

Joywould revisit the interactive dynamics of Sunforceto reimagine the fluid space of transitanimated by the earlier mural on an even grander scale. At 54 by 6.4 metres, the majestic Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) subway station skylight—her only publicly funded commission—has been justifiably likened to a “cathedral.”[34] The winning entry in a 1975 open competition, Joy’s 318 individual panels of airbrushed tempered glass were installedbetween 1976 and 1977.[35] If, as Wanda Nanibush observes, Letendre’s adoption of the airbrush in 1971 supported her production of “mature colour field abstraction[s],”[36] Joy’s luminous, spray-painted canopy actualized the American colour field painter Jules Olitski’s seemingly implausible ambition “to spray colour in the air and have it remain there.”[37]

Like Sunforce, Joy defined a vibrant public space of “continuous action” that was also a powerful testament to the enduring presence, resilience and creativity of Indigenous people.[38] But after years of neglect that resulted in extensive weather damage, Letendre insisted that the ruined skylight be de-installed in the early 1990s.[39] Joy thereby joined a growing roster of public art works by Letendre that had either been de-installed, destroyed or obscured: from Upward Dream (1980)—commissioned by Omnitown Developments in response to the public outcry sparked by the corporation’s occlusion of Sunrise, only to be removed in turn when the masonry of the eastern wall of the Neill-Wycik tower on which it was painted prove faulty—to Urtu (1972), which graced the Davenport Road office of Dr. Stanley Horowitz until it was painted over in the 1990s.[40] The current whereabouts of other public paintings—including the six-metre-wide Now (1971), commissioned by Greenwin Corporation for its Berkshire House residential and office complex at Eglinton and Yonge—remain unknown at the time of writing.[41] The monumental (3.1 x 15.6-metre) 1974 canvas Irowakan, originally installed in the lower banking floor of the Royal Bank Plaza in Toronto’s financial district, fared slightly better: after being transferred to Royal Bank’s Montréal office at Place Ville-Marie in 1985, it was acquired by the Joliette Art Museum in 2004.[42]

Rita Letendre: Toronto Public Art is the first exhibition focused on Letendre’s public art in Toronto. It reunites the recently-restored Sunrise II (1972)—an imposing sequel to the obscured Neill-Wycik mural, originally installed in the lobby of Greenwin Square on Bloor Street—with Ixtepec (1977), the basis for Letendre’s forthcoming reinterpretation of her 1978 skylight for Glencairn subway station, which is slated for completion in 2019.[43] Supplementary documents include plans for both the original and forthcoming Glencairn projects, as well as a new video interview with the now 90-year-old artist. The exhibition temporarily reactivates the publicness of Letendre’s Toronto public art as a speculative space of remembrance, reconciliation and futurity.

 

ADAM LAUDERis a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University in Toronto. He obtained a Ph.D. from The Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto in Fall 2016. He is currently researching Canadian information art in the 1970s. Since 2009, he has curated and co-curated exhibitions for a variety of museum and university art gallery venues. He has also contributed articles to scholarly journals including Amodern, Art Documentation, Canadian Journal of Communication, Future Anterior, Imaginations, Journal of Canadian Studies, Technoetic Arts, The Journal of Canadian Art History, TOPIA and Visual Resources as well as features and shorter texts to magazines including Art Handler, Border Crossings, C, Canadian Art, e-flux, Flash Art, Hunter and Cook and Millions. He edited H& IT ON (YYZBOOKS, 2012), featuring original art by ground-breaking information artist IAIN BAXTER&, and is the author of chapters appearing in Finding McLuhan (2015), The Logic of Nature, The Romance of Space (2010) as well as Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices(YYZBOOKS, 2010).

Adam Lauder would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

 

RITA LETENDREwas born of Abenaki and Quebecois parents in Drummondville in 1928 and has lived in Toronto since late 1969. Her painting career began in Montreal in the 1950s, when she associated with Quebec’s prominent abstract artist groups Les Automatistes and Les Plasticiens. Often the sole female artist in their group shows, she broke away from their approach to painting, finding it restrictive. Seeking to express the full energy of life and harness in her powerful gestures an intense spiritual force, Letendre worked with various materials including oils, pastels, and acrylics, using her hands, palette knife, brushes and uniquely the airbrush, which she began using in 1971. She received the Order of Canada in 2005, has completed commissions across Canada and the United States, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Notes

[1] Georgiana Uhlyarik, “Letendre in Toronto,” in Rita Letendre: Fire & Light, eds. Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017), 86.

[2] See Luis Jacob, “The Ward, Toronto: A Blank Space,” Canadian Art32, no. 4 (2016): 90-91.

[3] See Gunda Lambton, Stealing the Show: Seven Women Artists in Canadian Public Art(Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 56.

[4] Jeanne Morningstar Kent, The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 49. “[C]alled Wabanaki (People of the Dawn) by their inland neighbors, for each morning the first sunlight on the continent belonged to them. And they belonged to it, for they believed that Kisuhs, the great Sky Fire, was the ultimate spirit-power in a world in which everything was imbued with a sacred force.” Bunny McBride, Women of the Dawn (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 7.

[5] See Linklater qtd. in Adam Lauder, “‘The World Must Have Poetry’: Rita Letendre’s Public Art Interventions,” Canadian Art 32, no. 4 (2016): 116.

[6] See “Painter Rita Letendre on her Work in 1969,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, December 28, 1969, http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/896872003631.

[7] Letendre qtd. in Lambton, Stealing the Show, 51.

[8] Wanda Nanibush, “Rita Letendre: Fire & Light,” in Rita Letendre: Fire & Light, eds. Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017), 20.

[9] Letendre qtd. in Sandra Paikowsky, “Rita Letendre,” in Rita Letendre: The Montréal Years 1953-1963 (Montréal: Concordia Art Gallery, 1989), 30.

[10] “To guarantee symmetry in our designs, thin pieces of birch bark were folded several times and then bitten, creating small punctured holes. … Folding the bark in this way is similar to the way people create cut-paper snowflakes.” Kent, The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art, 24-25. The “acute black ray” that anchors many of Letendre’s arrow paintings recalls the “dark surface” of “spring-peeled birch bark” or “black broadcloth” of woodland clothing that serve as supports for much Abenaki expression. Anne-Marie Ninacs, “The Teaching of Life,” in Rita Letendre: Aux couleurs du jour (Québec, QC: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2003), 134; Kent, The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art, 40, 27.

[11] Kent, The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art, 47.

[12] Rita Letendre, “Rita Letendre,” video interview by Adam Lauder, July 13, 2017. “The force of life is marvelous to me. We see the same force in the sea, the sun, all around us. It is the same strength that makes human beings dream—to want to go to the moon—to accomplish the impossible.” Letendre qtd. in Elise Emery, “‘Sunforce,’ 1965,” Press Telegram (Long Beach), July 21, 1965, n. pag.

[13] David Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 118.

[14] Ninacs, “The Teaching of Life,” 136; François Laruelle,Photo-Fiction: A Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk(Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012), 1.

[15] Lambton, Stealing the Show, 55.

[16] See Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni, eds.,Art, Women, California 1950-2000: Parallels and Intersections (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Rachel Rivenc, Made in Los Angeles: Materials, Processes, and the Birth of West Coast Minimalism(Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2016).

[17] Anne-Marie Ninacs also attributes the mutations in Letendre’s practice that led to the arrows to the artist’s association with the Tamarind printmaking workshop upon arriving in California. See Ninacs, “The Teaching of Life,” 134; see also Lambton, Stealing the Show, 55.

[18] “Science always fascinated me,” Letendre continues; “knowledge of the world, knowledge of life, the way life evolved. … If I had been from a rich family, and going to school and university, I don’t know if I would have been a painter: maybe I would have been, but I would certainly want to be a scientist also.” Letendre, “Rita Letendre.”

[19] See Paikowsky, “Rita Letendre,” 6.

[20] Letendre, “Rita Letendre.”

[21] See Lambton, Stealing the Show, 51.

[22] This memory bears some striking similarities to a Zennist parable annotated, according to Anne-Marie Ninacs, in Letendre’s well-used copy of Reps’s anthology Zen Flesh, Zen Bones:

A man travelling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

 

Muju, “A Parable,” in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and pre-Zen Writings, ed. Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1957), 32. See also Ninacs, “The Teaching of Life,” 137.

[23] Letendre, “Rita Letendre.” “While Letendre herself did not subscribe to de Stijl flatness, the tempering of illusionistic space was certainly important for attaining harmonious colour juxtapositions and her increased use of white provided a new type of spatial field.” Paikowsky, “Rita Letendre,” 15.

[24] Ninacs, “The Teaching of Life,” 136.

[25] Paul-Émile Borduas, “Refus Global,” in Refus global et autres écrits: essais, ed. André-G. Bourassa and Gilles Lapointe (Montréal: l’Hexagone, 1997), 72.

[26] Paikowsky, “Rita Letendre,” 19.

[27] In fact, it is arguably Letendre’s colourism, and the interactivity of works such as Sunforceand Joy, rather than her occasional deployment of geometry, that aligns her work with a generation of “post-Plasticiens” who “pursue[d] new colour-based, dynamic ways of engaging the viewer,” notably Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant. Roald Nasgaard, “The Plasticiens and Beyond,” in The Plasticiens and Beyond: Montreal, 1955-1970 (Markham, ON: Varley Art Gallery of Markham; Québec, QC: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2013), 14.

[28] Paikowsky dates the beginnings of Letendre’s investigation of her Indigenous heritage to 1961: “It was at this time that Letendre became more interested in her own aboriginal Indian origins which she has said was prompted by her new interest in Mexican and Pre-Columbian art.” Paikowsky, “Rita Letendre,” 29. It is important to note that Abenaki art itself manifests a longstanding condition of hybridity: “Because of the reciprocal influences,” notes Kent, “there is difficulty in drawing a line between designs copied from European work.” Kent, The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art, 40. “Nuns … taught our young women embroidery, and we taught them beading. The result was a blending of cultural designs.” Ibid, 22.

[29] Letendre qtd. in Paikowsky, “Rita Letendre,” 30.

[30] Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 282; see also Adam Lauder, “Rita Letendre: Confronting the Grid,” Millions, no. 2 (2013): 32-27. “Rays and radiations appeared. She mixed her colours with powder of mother of pearl in order to intensify the iridescence of the shafts of light radiating across the whole surface of her canvases.” Gilles Hénaultqtd. in Rita Letendre(Palm Springs, CA: Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1974), n. pag.

[31] Borduas qtd. in Ninacs, “The Teaching of life,” 132. “Letendre’s contrasts of deep, cool blues with radiant red and orange have an expansive quality of the infinite that cannot be contained.” Nanibush, “Rita Letendre,” 18.

[32] See Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, “The Gateless Gate,” in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and pre-Zen Writings, ed. Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1957), 89-131.

[33] Letendre qtd. in Emery, “‘Sunforce,’” n. pag.

[34] See Lambton: Stealing the Show, 50, 61; Jeanne Parkin qtd. in Lambton, Stealing the Show, 60.

[35] Lambton: Stealing the Show, 61.

[36] Nanibush, “Rita Letendre,” 18; see also Ninacs, “The Teaching of Life,” 135.

[37] Kenworth Moffett, “The Sculpture of Jules Olitski,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 8 (1969): 367.

[38] Letendre qtd. in Emery, “‘Sunforce,’” n. pag.

[39] “Procurement Authorization: Glencairn Skylight Replacement, Contract A11-5,” Toronto Transit Commission, July 12, 2017, https://www.ttc.ca/About_the_TTC/

Commission_reports_and_information/Commission_meetings/2017/July_12/Reports/7_Procurement_Authorization_Glencairn_Skylight_Replacement_C.pdf.

[40] See Uhlyarik, “Letendre in Toronto,” 98.

[41] See Uhlyarik, “Letendre in Toronto,” 96. Other Toronto area public art works by Letendre that are currently missing in action include two commissions by J.D.S. Investments: the 1972 Tecumseth, originally installed at the Sheridan Mall in Pickering, and a series of paintings installed at 1000 Finch Avenue West. See Lambton: Stealing the Show, 57.

[42] See Lambton: Stealing the Show, 59; Uhlyarik, “Letendre in Toronto,” 104.

[43] “Glencairn Station – Skylight Replacement: August 2017 to March 2019,” Toronto Transit Commission, 2017, https://www.ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/

Glencairn_skylights.jsp.

 

 

 

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

RITA LETENDRE | TORONTO PUBLIC ART 
YYretroZpective
ORGANIZED BY ADAM LAUDER
SATURDAY 26 MAY 2018 – SATURDAY 21 JULY 2018

KRISTA BELLE STEWART | A GUEST A HOST A GHOST
SATURDAY 26 MAY – SATURDAY 21 JULY 2018

OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY 25 MAY 2018, 6:00PM-8:00PM

RITA LETENDRE | TORONTO PUBLIC ART 
YYretroZpective
ORGANIZED BY ADAM LAUDER
SATURDAY 26 MAY 2018- SATURDAY 21 JULY 2018

For years, RITA LETENDRE’s public art cut radiant vectors across Toronto’s urban grid. After decades living in Montréal and California, Letendre relocated to Toronto in 1970. Through a combination of public and private commissions for monumental murals and large-scale canvases, the artist, who is of Abenaki/Québecois and Mohawk/Québecois ancestry, quickly made her mark on the notoriously generic public spaces of her adoptive hometown. By the decade’s close, her signature “arrow” paintings—hard-edge, iridescent abstractions—were a daily sight for thousands of Torontonians. Yet, through a combination of misadventure and neglect, Letendre’s once ubiquitous and cherished public art works steadily vanished, beginning with Sunrise (1971), her dazzling, seven-floor mural for Ryerson’s Neill Wycik residence, which was permanently obscured when an adjacent 25-story residential tower was erected in 1978, leaving only a 10-inch gap between the two buildings. Duane Linklater, an artist of Omaskêko Cree heritage whose projects excavate subterranean narratives of Indigenous presence and resilience, has interpreted the disappearance of Letendre’s public art in Toronto as a symptom of the historic dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

Rita Letendre | Toronto Public Art is the first exhibition focused on Letendre’s Toronto public art. It reunites the recently-restored Sunrise II (1972)—an imposing sequel to the obscured Neill Wycik mural—with Ixtepec (1977), the basis for Letendre’s forthcoming Joy, a reinterpretation of the artist’s 1978 skylight for Glencairn subway station, which was de-installed following years of neglect. Supplementary documents include plans for both the original and forthcoming Glencairn projects, and a new video interview with the 90-year-old artist.

YYZ acknowledges the support of Galerie Gevik (Toronto), Galerie Simon Blais (Montréal), and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

ADAM LAUDER is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University in Toronto. He obtained a Ph.D. from The Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto in Fall 2016. He is currently researching Canadian information art in the 1970s. Since 2009, he has curated and co-curated exhibitions for a variety of museum and university art gallery venues. He has also contributed articles to scholarly journals including Amodern, Art Documentation, Canadian Journal of Communication, Future Anterior, Imaginations, Journal of Canadian Studies, Technoetic Arts, The Journal of Canadian Art History, TOPIA and Visual Resources as well as features and shorter texts to magazines including Art Handler, Border Crossings, C, Canadian Art, e-flux, Flash Art, Hunter and Cook and Millions. He edited H& IT ON (YYZBOOKS, 2012), featuring original art by ground-breaking information artist IAIN BAXTER&, and is the author of chapters appearing in Finding McLuhan (2015), The Logic of Nature, The Romance of Space (2010) as well as Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices (YYZBOOKS, 2010).

Adam Lauder would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

KRISTA BELLE STEWART | A GUEST A HOST A GHOST
SATURDAY 26 MAY – SATURDAY 21 JULY 2018

Krista Belle Stewart brings to YYZ dirt from her home in the Okanagan Nation and from Seoul, South Korea, both collections beautifully housed in ceramic containers. Stewart will explore our immediate environment for a possible addition to her growing soil archive, which acts as a travelling reminder of her home and grounding Stewart to where she stands.

KRISTA BELLE STEWART holds an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Her work engages with the complexities of archival material through processes that allow for both intimacy and coincidence and for the atemporal meeting of actors across time. Working with video, photography, design, ephemera and textiles, Stewart straddles the gaps between personal and institutional histories through transparent mediation. Stewart’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; House of World Cultures, Berlin; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Mercer Union, Toronto; Artspeak, Vancouver; the Western Front, Vancouver; and Esker Foundation, Calgary. She is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation and lives and works in Vancouver.

Krista Belle Stewart gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Columbia Arts Council. She would like to thank Steven Cottingham for writing a text for the exhibition. 

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

Elicser Elliott: YYZ Lending Library


Elicser Elliott explores narrative structures, new surfaces, and new sensations through the lens of more than a decade spent in the global aerosol art community. A distinctive character-based practice, the work of Elicser is highly visible in major cities from Toronto to South America to South Africa. His work was recently featured at the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum.

The graffiti debate rages in a city where the creative talent born from the alleys and walls of the urban infrastructure is flourishing. Known for his intuitive ability to capture the essence of a subject, Elicser Elliott leads the charge in the character-based movement in Toronto. His work can be found at elicser.com.

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

When Things Occur by Doreen Mende

This text is a slightly revised version of the previously published contribution commissioned by vdrome.org in conjuction with ORAIB TOUKAN‘s exhibition, When Things Occur.

When Things Occur (2016) by Oraib Toukan is based on Skype conversations with Gaza inhabitants who were behind the images that were transmitted from screen to screen in the summer of 2014. The subsequent remarks are organised in four short segments that end up with open questions which expand the reflections touched upon here.

(one)

Watching artist and researcher Oraib Toukan’s When Things Occur (2016) makes one want to better understand the contemporary conditions of image processing as a militant-civil force. When Things Occur is a conversation piece, a visual research, an investigation, a desktop-documentary, and a collection of perspectives on contemporary image-(geo-)politics accommodating the Palestinian struggle for independence, including the right for visual self-determination. The work offers a reflection on techno-spatial conditions of image processing as an internationalizing force, as well as an enforced violence for the struggle of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, particularly in Gaza after the Israeli attacks of 2014. Let us think of a civil contract of digital photography by considering the usage of the (mobile-phone) camera that people occupy to report from their homes under attack, posted in real-time or live-streamed on #GazaUnderAttack or on social media platforms. “[…] We would be under bombardment, shaking with fear, but I won’t let go of my mobile phone”, says Lara Abu Ramadan, reporting from Gaza. A “seeing the war from inside the home” that is shared online speaks of that techno-civilian force in When Things Occur. How can we understand the politics of the domestic attached to mobile phones, social media or networking services and digital platforms in relation to the possibility of an emancipatory image? 

(two)

The relation between ‘local’ and ‘foreigner’ narrated by Gazan freelance photojournalist Hosam Salem, is an important sequence in When Things Occur. He clearly differentiates between ‘local’ / ‘mahaliyin’ and ‘foreigner’ / ’ajnabi’ in Arab language. His award-winning Gazan colleague Khalil Hamra speaks about himself as a ‘local photographer’. Strikingly, he adopts the English term ‘local’ instead of the Arabic ‘mahaliyin’. Similar perhaps to the term ‘curator’, commonly used in English in Arabic, the adaption of ‘local’ into Arabic by a Palestinian photographer speaks of two things: of the awareness the photographer has of his job under the impact of globalization in economic, cultural, linguistic as well as visual terms, and of the urgency to re-articulate the entanglement between the particular (‘local’) with the universal (‘global’) or the ‘local’ with the ‘foreign’, in relation to the production of a ramified image-space, as investigated by When Things Occur. Digital image-making asks for an update of a geo-spatial reading of the image that I would link with the ‘navigational landscape’, as Reza Negarestani proposes by theorizing the interaction of the with the universal (or global-local interlacement, or the local-foreigner entanglement) in our era of algorithmic capitalism as a form of global capitalism. I wonder, regarding the exhausted and exploited concern for image-politics in the Palestinian struggle, about the visual-practical consequences of mobile-phone images, planetary computation and social media for our understanding of a ‘productive locality’ of the image, which is an image ‘across different scales of magnification’. When Things Occur analyses the image by documenting it through its pixel-grid, the variety of online image sizes (pixel dimension and scale styles), or the page of Google-images showing copy after copy the same picture. A good example is the front-page of The Guardian of July 31, 2014, featuring the image of a crying Gazan girl taken by the international Gazan freelance photojournalist Khalil Hamra. To consider the possibility of the image as a techno-spatial platform, or as a geopolitical fabric crossing borders, time zones, eyes, and perspectives in When Things Occur allows us to approach the form of screen-navigation as a ‘concept-practice’ (Tom Holert) that stretches from ‘inside the home’ in Gaza to our computer-screens in Oxford, Athens, Berlin, Geneva or in transit at the airport. In this sense, When Things Occur may point us to the emergence of a new visual vocabulary to document and internationalize the Palestinian Cause by making use of digital infrastructures for the production and distribution of images. However, is it too naive to anticipate the emergence of a navigational image-space with the capacity to go beyond the indexical document towards a truly transformative operation that interrupts reproductive forces of ‘infrastructural violence’, as Susan Schuppli describes the systemic erosion of rights beneath the digital cladding, and that instead can install complex narrations of the Palestinian situation through images?

(three)

When Things Occur also makes us engage with the economic implications of digital image technologies in the context of (anti-)photojournalism regarding the Palestinian question. This has been a big issue for decades, concomitant with Marxist-Leninist commitments of filmmakers and photographers of the P.L.O. since the late 1960s. Obviously, the possibility to circulate images via social media platforms puts pressure on the monopoly of international press-agencies with headquarters in Paris, Rotterdam or New York. Defining the conditions to sell an image is a possible force for a visual self-determination also in economic terms. Does this also affect the actual visual strategy? Hosam Salem states that “we as local photographers have finally concluded that bloody pictures do not address the western world”. However, in When Things Occur we see the travelling images of iconic tropes that are too familiar from the humanitarian discourse since the early 1980s: the lone child and the mourning parent. It seems logical that Palestinian photographers must be ahead of our time to think as well as produce an image beyond the binary imperatives of the local-foreigner entanglement. What image of the struggle would address the so-called ‘western world’ if it refuses the victim-image for ‘mobilizing shame’ as Tom Keenan analysed the visual forms of humanitarian violence more than ten years ago? What does resistance to the Occupation look like, and how do its images circulate today?

(four)

The 28-minute desktop-video investigates and labours the techno-spatial conditions of image processing. It considers the situation of Gaza after the 2014-wars entangled with global infrastructures. Thus, it provides an important analysis of a visually exhausted and exploited terrain that has been overproduced by media images for decades, by Human Rights discourses as well as by the field of international contemporary art, the arena where When Things Occur is presented. The desktop-video offers an update of the urgency to re-engage with the question of the image as a geopolitical issue for the Palestinian cause. Its image-regimes offer a contested terrain as well as a lived reality and politics of the domestic in which ‘nobody will understand how we are living’, as Gaza international photojournalist and blogger Lara Abu Ramadan states in her conversation with Oraib Toukan. The film probes the face of mourning and grief—its digital embodiment, transmission, and representation. It asks, as Toukan has written elsewhere, how the gaze gets channelled within the digital realm, and how empathy travels. What exactly is viewing suffering ‘at a distance’? What is the behaviour and political economy of the image of war? And who is the ‘local’ in the representation of war? 

Credits
Editing: Oraib Toukan
Audio Post Production: Geoff Mullen
Editing Consultant: Casey Asprooth-Jackson
Translation & Subtitles: Fadi Abu Nimeh, Oraib Toukan
Commissioned by Cities Exhibition 2016, Birzeit University Museum.
Supported by the Ruskin School of Art.

Presented in collaboration with the Images Festival, April 12 – April 20, 2018

DOREEN MENDE is a curator, theorist, researcher, and writer. She is currently Associate Professor and Director of the CCC Research Master and PhD-Forum of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD in Geneva, Switzerland. She is a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Her research interests include (geo)spatial practices in image regimes, exhibition-making, curatorial politics, archival metabolisms, decolonizing socialism, and concept work. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London. Mende’s recent publications include KP Brehmer: Real Capital Production Raven Row and Koenig Books, London; and “Entries Towards a Society of Ramification” in Proxy Politics Power and Subversion in a Networked Age, edited by RCPP, Archive Books, Berlin.

ORAIB TOUKAN is an artist and Clarendon Scholar at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She is visiting tutor at the Ruskin School of Art and the International Academy of Fine Arts in Ramallah, Palestine. Until Fall 2015, she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine. Recent exhibitions include the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Qalandia International, The Center for Contemporary Art Glasgow, the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Mori Art Museum, and the 11th Istanbul Biennale.

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

The Space and its Contents by Alex Bowron

This text by ALEX BOWRON was published alongside DAVID YU‘S exhibition, Between You and I.

THE SPACE AND ITS CONTENTS

In the waiting room, there are more bodies than chairs. It smells stuffy and bored. There is only one seat available and a TV mounted just high enough to cause a quick kink in the neck. At least it is clear what we are supposed to do: enter the space, watch, wait, readjust, remain optimistic. This final point despite being forced to consume a fragmented over-saturation of too much information that is no information at all.

This space is not a space. This space reminds us of a space – here, and outside of here. A juxtaposition of several spaces forming a single, ‘real’ place. A break with traditional time.

We are uncertain of how to behave, in part, because the boundaries between hear and outside of here are not entirely clear. Our presence furthers blurs these lines. We can act ourselves (real), or we can follow the instructions (construct). Maybe there is no difference. Maybe they are not instructions. Either way, we agree to perform in/voluntary inter-relations in a communal performance of ‘here’.

Once inside, we sense that the room is ripe with reconfigured energy. Stability is just movement slowed down. Vibrational matter is battered from a methodic and meticulous labour; secure in in its position of infinity between meaning and thing.

This space merges the visible and the immaterial. Like a phone call, or seeing your reflection in a mirror. It is real but not grounded. Like moving about an exhibition where each object refuses to remain in place. Activated by our presence but functioning non-hegemonically, the primitive cyborgs dictate, and are dictated by, our relative position. We dock ourselves as they do, when we run out of charge.

Between meaning and thing, an internal logic. It extends from within and in between the objects, the people, the actions. This site is all sites, defined by relations of proximity. This space is not that space due to fixed points between things. Every body has agency and purpose. It is our job to determine how we fit in.

We can see that our chance of remaining passive was abandoned unknowingly at the entrance. We agree to participate upon entry. This is what we do every time we enter. We agree within reason to behave, to work, to absorb, to engage.

THE CONTENTS AND WHAT THEY TELL US

The objects prioritize how they relate to each other. They are busy activating their space, encouraging action, and effecting behavior. We speculate that the real differences in the world are not between humans and non-humans, but between objects and their relations. We cannot speak purely about an object being dropped or dragged. We can only speak to our experience of the dropping and dragging; to our experience of the evidence that remains. It is only when the object breaks that we notice its qualities.

This tension extends from the object’s twisted banged up folds, out towards its framing mechanism. This is the truth of understanding our world through the things we share it with. They, like us, occupy space through a series of relations: boundaries unclear and definitions fluid. We are autonomous units with agency, defined by a unified reality. They remind us that it is the space between where we should direct our focus. The objects are committed to their belonging with such vigor that we begin to believe them. After all, they have purpose, place, history, and a future. We are only here momentarily to share their world. This anthropodecentrism is the object’s ontology. We are just passing through.

The experience which tests this theory is defined by relational action. Instead of proving that the objects are secondary, we can confirm, through a systematic setting up of chance, an activation of the space between. An action performed, or evidence of an action performed. These social experiments are orchestrated through a display of evidence where objects play the lead. The viewer’s actions become both subject and substance of the art. Art becomes a cognitive model for philosophy – a place without a place; a place and a non-place where the space is not a space.

This is the art that you cannot see. It is the stuff of human environs. It is an interference with habit, a thing, tangible or not, created or found, that occupies a space outside of ‘normal’. Its successes lie in how effectively it takes us away from the familiar. It is a subjective pathway to objectivity. The further it pushes our modes of thought, the better it becomes.

SIDE NOTE ON THE MIRROR AS A MOST FASCINATING HETEROTOPIA

In 6000 BC, humans were polishing volcanic glass to create personal, portable reflective surfaces. We were dissatisfied from the start with our distorted portrait in water’s surface, or second-hand descriptions from our peers.

The mirror space merges the visible and immaterial. It is everywhere and nowhere at once. It counteracts real space, reflecting and therefore increasing its depth, but is also a real space onto itself. It is in the mirror where we discover our absence from the place that we are: on this piece of the earth, in our head, a part of our mother, forever young. The mirror is my own gaze directed at myself. It reinforces my relationship with myself. It is the only way to see myself, and yet, I can only ever see myself inverted. It designates the space that I occupy: my body, my space, the inter-relations between. My reflection is an absolutely real, primordial, un-objectified ‘I’. It is connected with all that surrounds it, complete with unique qualities that interrelate to make me whole. It is a window into the world where ‘the entire picture is looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene’[1].

An effective apparatus to establish perspective, and yet, everything is backwards. My reflection is equally unreal, a fictitious depth, because it cannot be touched, it cannot move unless I move, it is but the threshold to the visible world. It is isolating and penetrable at once. It is virtual, in a perpetual state of ‘over there’, oscillating between interior and exterior; a perpetual heterotopia that is indifferent to my gaze. It is a peering into Galileo’s infinite void. It causes me to believe that I am an autonomous independent being, while causing me to question this very belief. It emphasizes my lack; causing me to yearn for that which I am not and seek profoundly a relationship between myself and the real. It is a point of connection that makes me aware of the space that surrounds my body. In private, it forces me outside of myself, in order to know myself socially. It is an exteriorizing tool, an extension of my cortex: ‘I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears’[2]. Within the space of the mirror, the domain of vision becomes integrated into a field of desire.

[1] Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I and Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a. In ‘Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists; A Critical Reader’, Christopher Kul-Want, ed. pp.174

[2] ibid. Lacan pp.158

ALEX BOWRON is a freelance writer and curator based in Toronto, where she also works as Assistant Director at MKG127 and Auction Manager at the Canadian Art Foundation. She holds a BFA in Sculpture/Installation from OCADU and an MA in Critical Cultural Theory from University of Leeds, UK.

DAVID YU is a multimedia, installation, and performance artist that currently practices out of Toronto. He received a Masters in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK (2008) and his Bachelors in Fine Art from the Ontario College of Art and Design (2006). Until recently David practiced in London, U.K.,exhibiting work throughout Europe and abroad. His exhibition record includes: a one month durational performance during the exhibition Onderweg at Cultuurcentrum Zwaneberg, Heist-op-den-Berg, Belgium(2017); a solo exhibition at MART Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2015); participation with Flux Night 2012 (Nuit Blanche Atlanta, Georgia) with a multi–channel video installation, Small Meteorites, projected within five vehicles; a city wide art installation commissioned and curated by the Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design (2011), funded by the Scottish Arts Council; a solo exhibition at the Monster Truck Gallery in Dublin Ireland (2011); a Triangle Arts Trust residency and solo exhibition at the Kuona Trust Gallery in Nairobi, Kenya (2011). This summer David will be participating in a residency and organizing a solo exhibition with The Orleans Gallery in Ottawa.

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

David Yu: Between You and I

DAVID YU | BETWEEN YOU AND I 
SATURDAY 17 MARCH – SATURDAY 28 APRIL 2018

OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY 16 MARCH 2018, 6:00PM-8:00PM

DAVID YU | BETWEEN YOU AND I
For YYZ Artists’ Outlet David Yu presents new work developed from his research in performance practice, specifically the intersection between performance, installation, and sculpture. Between you and I playfully investigates notions behind heterotopias, object oriented ontology, and relational aesthetics, examining formal structures of sculpture and installation situated within a gallery context whilst punctuated with the performative act/gesture. The works provocatively open up avenues for a more visceral experience, calling on the viewers to actively insert themselves within the work both consciously and involuntarily. Subtle participatory cues signal to viewers that further engagement is necessary, be it participating and negotiating physically, pondering the validity, and investigating more in depth – all whilst playing with the predisposition and stigma that both gallery spaces and “art” often carry with them.

The artist positions himself within the creator catalyst role that generates situations for viewers to negotiate. With much of his work there is an element of social experimentation, garnering responses through a reaction to planned situations. Ultimately David aims for a blurring between a constructed situation and a “real” situation.

DAVID YU  is a multimedia, installation, and performance artist that currently practices out of Toronto. He received a Masters in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK (2008) and his Bachelors in Fine Art from the Ontario College of Art and Design (2006). Until recently David practiced in London, U.K., exhibiting work throughout Europe and abroad. His exhibition record includes: a one month durational performance during the exhibition Onderweg at Cultuurcentrum Zwaneberg, Heist-op-den-Berg, Belgium (2017); a solo exhibition at MART Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2015); participation with Flux Night 2012 (Nuit Blanche Atlanta, Georgia) with a multi–channel video installation, Small Meteorites, projected within five vehicles; a city wide art installation commissioned and curated by the Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design (2011), funded by the Scottish Arts Council; a solo exhibition at the Monster Truck Gallery in Dublin Ireland (2011); a Triangle Arts Trust residency and solo exhibition at the Kuona Trust Gallery in Nairobi, Kenya (2011). This summer David will be participating in a residency and organizing a solo exhibition with The Orleans Gallery in Ottawa.

David Yu would like to acknowledge the generous support of YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Alex Bowron, Adam Brandejs, Danielle Greer, Mathew Birch, Ritchie Cheung, Talia Greenberg, Cailin Cser, Ben Carson, Karen Yu, Laura Moore, and James Rollo for making this exhibition possible.

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

Oraib Toukan: When Things Occur

 

ORAIB TOUKAN | WHEN THINGS OCCUR
SATURDAY 17 MARCH – SATURDAY 28 APRIL 2018
presented in collaboration with the Images Festival, April 12 – April 20, 2018

IMAGES FESTIVAL RECEPTION & ARTIST TALK
SATURDAY 14 APRIL, 2:00PM at YYZ
TALK WILL BEGIN AT 3:00PM at the Common on the 4th floor.

 

ORAIB TOUKAN| WHEN THINGS OCCUR
When Things Occur is based on Skype conversations with Gaza-based photographers, fixers and drivers who were behind specific images that were transmitted from screen to screen in the summer of 2014. The film probes the face of mourning and grief- its digital embodiment, transmission, and representation. It asks how the gaze gets channeled within the digital realm, and how empathy travels, digitally. Equally, how the documentary signifier – and its abstraction – operate when viewing suffering. What exactly is viewing suffering ‘at a distance’- and how many meters or kilometers is that? What is the behavior and political economy of the image of war? And who is the ‘local’ in the representation of war? What is the daily routine of those who represent war?

ORAIB TOUKAN is an artist and Clarendon Scholar at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She is visiting tutor at the Ruskin School of Art and the International Academy of Fine Arts in Ramallah, Palestine. Until Fall 2015, she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine. Recent exhibitions include the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Qalandia International, The Center for Contemporary Art Glasgow, the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Mori Art Museum, and the 11th Istanbul Biennale.

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson

Marie-Michelle Deschamps + Bryan-K. Lamonde: Better Times

MARIE-MICHELLE DESCHAMPS + BRYAN-K. LAMONDE | BETTER TIMES
SATURDAY 13 JANUARY 2018 – SATURDAY 03 MARCH 2018

OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY 12 JANUARY 2018, 6:00PM-8:00PM

MARIE-MICHELLE DESCHAMPS + BRYAN-K. LAMONDE | BETTER TIMES

In 2012, Marie-Michelle Deschamps and Bryan-K. Lamonde collaborated on The Twofold Room, a book-object linking philology and architectural form. This book took the reader on a journey following a horizontal line; a line starting with a red carpet, breaking at the reception desk, deploying itself endlessly in a hallway, and folding at the bedroom, where suddenly another appears, as it is, evidently, a double room. The Twofold Room explored the loss of identity caused by moving from one language to another as well the nightmare of interconnected elements slowly drifting apart.

At YYZ, Deschamps and Lamonde prolong their exploration of language as an inhabited space, a key element of their respective practice. They once again play with the material properties of words, letters, and signs, and use them as spaces to collapse, conceal, or inhabit; all the works acting as translations of our experience of the world of objects and forms — a world that we experience physically, but which is also wholly contingent upon language, it being in fact an inhabited space of language.

With Better Times, a simultaneous opened-ness and closed-ness acts to unsettle through a default of décor, to question whether there is any content separate from the process or means of revealing.

MARIE-MICHELLE DESCHAMPS is an artist based in Montreal, Quebec. Her work focuses on the ambiguities of deconstructed language and its transposition in signs and objects. The elusive signification exhibited in her drawings, sculptures and sounds works allow for figurative, abstract, and literary interpretations. She holds an M.A. from the Glasgow School of Art. Recently, her work was presented at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2017); Ausstellungraum Klingenthal, Basel, Switzerland (2017); Darling Foundry, Montreal (2016) and Glasgow International, Scotland (2016). In 2018, Deschamps will show her work at Diagonale, Montreal and at Parisian Laundry, Montreal.

BRYAN-K. LAMONDE is a graphic designer based in Montreal and one of the co-founders of Principal. Working in the realm of contemporary art, his approach has allowed him to collaborate, to create new approaches and to dialogue with numerous artists that share his concerns that are located at the crossroads of art and design. In addition to working with Deschamps on The Twofold Room (2012), he also contributed installations in the exhibitions L*, at the Darling Foundry (2016), Montreal and at Galerie UQO, Gatineau (2016).

Posted on by Mallory Wilkinson