convenience
24/7 window gallery
58 Lansdowne Avenue, Toronto M6K 2V9
(at Seaforth Avenue, one block North of Queen)
contact: conveniencegallery@gmail.com
convenience is a window gallery that provides an opening for art
that engages, experiments, and takes risks with the architectural, urban, and civic realm
Ilze Bebris
Warren
Wire and paper, 2011
November 25 to January 22
Warren is site-specific installation composed of hundreds of small wire and paper structures. Jammed together, they occupy the space of the storefront in an anarchic array. Like a cityscape spun out of control, the installation reflects a congested streetscape on the edge of chaos. As neighbourhoods are colonized by urban renewal projects, empty storefront vitrines often are the sites where architectural models of soon to be constructed developments are displayed. Running against the grain of the polished and seamless architectural model, Warren, with its off centre towers and dense clusters of cells, speaks to the anxiety implicit in urban life as the pace of urban transformation accelerates.
Ilze Bebris is a North Vancouver artist, curator and educator working in sculpture and installation. A graduate of Emily Carr University she completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of University of Victoria in 2007. She has participated in a number of national and international exhibitions. She is interested in the fractured narratives that shape the culture of contemporary everyday life. Working mainly through a process of bricolage, she creates sculptural works and installations that explore the tensions around concepts of the natural and the artificial.
Ken Nicol
Fields
Photograph, 2011
September 27 to November 24
Dried potatoes, vegetable oil, corn flour, wheat starch, maltodextrin, mono- and diglycerides, water, salt, rice flour, citric acid, may contain dextrose.
Ken Nicol studied at several institutions before giving up on any kind of diploma. He currently works in his Toronto studio surrounded by old typewriters, clocks and broken things.
He is represented by MKG127, Toronto.
Eric Glavin
Red Light Indicates Doors are Secured
6 offset posters, 2011
August 29 to September 26
Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured [1] is a poster project built from an ongoing series documenting alarm panels in various parts of the world. The images are based on photographs of security panels found in stores, restaurants, galleries, and museums, as well as private homes.
There is something odd about alarm panels and keypads in the way that industrial designers have attempted to harmonize their features with (what they perceive to be) contemporary home-furnishing aesthetics. Slightly futuristic in intent, the panels appear out of place and intrusive, yet the interface is meant to provide a sense of security. Ultimately I see the way we interact with these security systems as analogous to the individual’s interaction with the larger systems that govern their daily lives. Obviously, within the field of electronic security devices, that engagement is set out in specific terms and when you see one of these keypads on the wall it automatically tells you that this space that you’ve entered, if it was otherwise unclear to you, is someone’s private space. If you are viewing the keypad passively then chances are you have been invited into this space in an act of good faith or negotiated trust. If you are viewing it actively, you have ownership of this space or you’ve been entrusted with arming and disarming it so that it can be used for the purpose it was intended – or conversely, you are breaking into the space and by doing so violating the very boundary that the alarm is meant enforce.
By turning these objects into artworks I draw attention to the passive-aggressive relationships within the aesthetic components of urban spaces we negotiate everyday. These posters exist in a public forum intended for communication, yet they are mute. They occupy space and in doing so they displace the voices of others. Whether you see that as an opportunity to contemplate your own voice depends on whether you feel this public space belongs to you or not. Are you the owner or intruder?
I would like to extend a special thanks to the Toronto Arts Council for providing the support and funding necessary for this project. I would also like to thank ‘Kojo’ Boamah at FedEx Office Canada for his generous assistance as well as Monique LeBlanc, John Dube and Suzanne Carte for their help in bringing this project to life.
[1] Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not (2006)
Michelle McGeean
We have relocated to serve you better
Chain-link fence, sign, 2011
July 30 to August 28
We have relocated to serve you better is a site-specific installation consisting of two elements. The first is a sign that hangs in the window of the gallery: We have relocated to serve you better. This sign could be read as a kind of ruse (perhaps the gallery has moved?) or as a statement specifically addressing the identity of the “we” and “you” in the ongoing gentrification of Parkdale. The second element is a chain-link rental hoarding that encloses the front of the building, simultaneously framing the gallery and withholding it fully from view.
Hoarding structures are intended to enclose a construction site as a precautionary measure for the public. In preventing the public from entering or looking into the site, these structures are often similar to barricades used for crowd control. Unsurprisingly, the companies that supply hoarding structures are frequently those who provide barricades. The hoarding structure also is a reflection of areas under transition, whether under the guise of ‘urban renewal’ or ‘urban gentrification’.
Michelle McGeean is an artist who views the material properties of sculpture and printmaking in opposition to each other. As a result, her research has evolved into an interest in the relationship between the volatility of objects versus the persistence of the page. She is currently completing her MFA at The University of Western Ontario.
Andrew Jones
Crossing
air, paper, geometry (2011)
July 1 to July 29
Crossing is a kinetic installation using two fields of lines cajoled into a moiré dance by an electric fan. Through the simplest of means (air, paper, geometry) the shop front is transformed into a dynamic beacon, invoking a sense of wonder and delight in passersby.
Andrew Jones designs furniture and lighting products, residential and commercial interiors, and commissioned designs. Jones received a Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Toronto in 1991, and a Master of Arts (Furniture) degree at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1997. He teaches at the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, and has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and the Ontario College of Art and Design.
Paul Roorda
Take Notice
mixed media (2011)
June 1 to June 30
Reconstruct the original context of these odd missives: a bus stop, an intersection, a sidewalk. The casual observer spots the small placard securely wired and nailed to a telephone pole. A closer look reveals the weathered image: it may be a photo of a power plant, an earthwork, a highway cloverleaf; it may be a drawing of the bones in the hand, a pair of prizefighters, the fragment of a coastline. These pictures, culled from the pages of mid-20th encyclopedias, hail the viewer — Something for you here! — and direct her to Take Notice. Of what? The notable remains of another age? Possibly. But one also imagines the observer’s eyes nervously glancing around: the lonely bus shelter, the grimy street, the boxy houses. Will these be the odds and ends documented in a future era’s archive of forgotten splendors?
If Roorda’s work seems cautionary (“take notice,” after all), one cannot claim that it is overtly political or environmentalist. There is yet beauty in these industrial fantasies… The world we have birthed is, at last, of our kind and we cannot disown it. This is why the project’s first site of installation was the cityscape, in the interstices of the built environment from which it draws its breath. So, too, the project cannot be set aside when the eye leaves the borders of the mounting paper, for the afterimage is concretely manifested in the surround-world itself. Thus, the viewer is not supplied with a clear message or a set of sensible action steps. The viewer has only been primed to observe the sky and the material world anew, with vision refreshed by its encounter with the art object. For, in the end, it is the awakened eye that is prized by this work. Only by comparing the represented world with his own original will the viewer reset the ocular circuit; only then will he truly take notice.
– Catalogue exerpt, Andrew McMurry, University of Waterloo, Department of English Language and Literature
Paul Roorda lives in Waterloo, Ontario and makes art using discarded books, vintage medical objects, and found materials. His work investigates changing belief systems, the construction of knowledge, and the practice of ritual in religion, science, medicine, and environmentalism. He has exhibited extensively including shows at the Toronto School of Theology, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and Wilfrid Laurier University. He was the Artist in Residence for the City of Kitchener in 2007 and has been the subject of an episode of “The Artist’s Life” which aired on Bravo! TV. He has been awarded grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and his work is found in numerous collections including the Donovan Collection at the University of Toronto. Paul Roorda is also on the board of directors of CAFKA, the Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area.
Abbas Akhavan
2nd May Day
plywood panels, poster, paint (2011)
May 2 to May 31
contact: abbasa77@gmail.com
Born in Tehran, Abbas Akhavan currently lives and works in Toronto. His practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video and performance. For the past five years, the domestic sphere has been an ongoing research in Akhavan’s work. Much of the work explores the relationship between the house and nation state and how the trauma and systemic violence enacted upon civilians can be inherited and re-enacted within the family lineage, where the home becomes a forked space between hospitality and hostility. More recent works have shifted focus onto spaces just outside the home: the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes.
Akhavan’s work has been exhibited in galleries such as Vancouver Art Gallery, Artspeak and Trinity Square Video (Canada); Kunsten Museum of Modern Art (Denmark); Le Printemps de septembre a Toulouse (France); Botkryka Konsthall (Sweden); and Third Line (Dubai, UAE). Recent residencies include Fundatcion Marcelino Botin with Mona Hatoum, (Spain); Axenéo7 and Video In (Canada); and the Delfina foundation residency (Dubai). Currently Akhavan is preparing for a group show at Belvedere Museum (Austria), with upcoming solo exhibitions at Artspeak, Modern Fuel, Peel art gallery and The Darling Foundry (Canada).
Abbas Akhavan is represented by The Third Line.
Kristen Peterson
Waiting Room (or, Are you inside or outside?)
vinyl and ink (2011)
April 3 to May 2
contact: info@kristenpeterson.ca
Waiting Room creates space using linear perspective and relationships of size and tone. The drawing is an abstraction: part diagram and part recollection. Walking along the street, you might look into the space, notice its shapes and colours, ponder its significance, perhaps shake your fist. Maybe you ignore it altogether. But some will imagine being behind the glass, lit by the 24-hour glow of a low-watt bulb, observed and unable to leave.
Kristen Peterson works primarily in installation, creating site-specific drawings on buildings that explore how we create and perceive space. Her first permanent installation, commissioned by the TTC, is at the Russell Hill Road transit shelter on the St. Clair West streetcar line. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from McGill University and a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
Dimitri Papatheodorou
Into Space
triptych, oil on board (2011)
March 3 to April 2
I made this painting to respond to the scale and proportions of the convenience gallery. At 5 by 9 feet, it’s the biggest of this series so far. And, it’s the first time a gallery — more specifically a gallery curator, Scott Sørli — has actually influenced me in the way of form, and consequently content of a piece.
So, these pieces are inspired by the spatial representations of artists like Kazuo Nakamura. He is likely my favourite of the Painters 11, and even of all the artists fitting into the tradition of abstract expressionism. Although my work looks ‘cool’ I see it as ‘hot.’ I suppose the blueness of the palette and the starkness of the image are kind of cool at first look, but I’m going for feeling and emotion here as much as I am cool intellectual construct. I think the best artwork strives for both cool and hot at the same time.
And then it’s also about the making of the thing. If I can bring the famous, and perhaps notorious, philosopher Martin Heidegger into it: in architecture Heidegger believed that authentic work only came from building and thinking and dwelling at the same time. So process is really important. For me these paintings are a culmination of many glazes of oil paint. The image is constructed like a building, over a long period of time. If you think about the best art and architecture being about mind and body, or thinking and making, then it follows that all art, ascribed with meaning or value, is imbued with performance, and therefore is performance.
The painting therefore is about the performance of light, both in the passive and active sense; passively, as a reflection of environmental light, and actively as a design of spatial relationships defined by light. Light is the form and content of the painting. The pigment of the painting was layered up to allow for emanation. The contrast between light and dark, push and pull, allows for this performance to happen. For me, the distinction between artistic disciplines, between painting and architecture, is slight. Design and art merge in real-time and space, the city is the greatest work of all, and painting is a surface for the investigation of these congruent art-forms.
Dimitri Papatheodorou is a Toronto based artist. He teaches at both the Institute Without Boundaries and at Ryerson University. He studied architecture in the 80s at the University of Waterloo where he completed his degrees in Environmental Studies and Architecture. His book titled Painting Architecture & Song was published in 2010 by the Institute Without Boundaries and can be downloaded for free at www.dimitripapatheodorou.com
Adam David Brown
Constellation
vinyl, holes (2011)
February 3 to March 3
Constellation transforms the windows of the convenience gallery into a light box that uses vinyl and light to project a translation of the Milky Way.
Adam David Brown is a multidisciplinary artist living in Toronto. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, he completed his Masters of Fine Art at the University of Guelph in 2007. Guided by the principle of “less is more”, Adam’s work attempts to find a balance between emptiness and form, mark making and erasure. Adam is represented by MKG127.
Michelle Allard
Pink Peaks
shredded office paper (2011)
January 4 to February 2
Pink Peaks, a visual offering of respite from winter’s lackluster, is a part of a larger work in progress using mounds of shredded colourful office paper. Concurrent with an on-going series of office paper installations, Pink Peaks negotiates processes of accumulation, transience, and presentation. Post-exhibition the paper will be donated to local school board arts programs. Allard is also presenting Materialscape, a new office paper installation, at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery from January 21 to March 20.
Michelle Allard is visual artist based in Vancouver BC, with an MFA from the University of Guelph (2002). Allard has received production supporting grants through Toronto and BC Arts Councils and the Canada Council, has exhibited her sculpture and installations locally, nationally and internationally at art centres and artist run galleries such as Centre A, Vancouver; Atelier Tilde B, Paris (2009); Richmond Art Gallery (2007/08); Mercer Union (2006); and has taken part in artist residencies in Canada, France and northern Japan. Allard’s most recent activities are a Paris residency awarded by the Canada Council in 2009 and the Award live/work studio provided by the City of Vancouver for a tenure of 3 years (2009-2012), and she is a participating artist with this year’s Contemporary Art Gallery’s Annual Auction. Concurrent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Materialscape at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (January to March 2010); Deluge Contemporary, Victoria; and OU Galerie, Marseilles France.
Yvonne Singer
I I I I wa wa wa WANT
neon, mirror (2010)
December 5 to January 3
contact: ysinger@yorku.ca
I I I I I wa wa wa WANT is a site-specific installation consisting of the words “I want” in neon, and mounted on 2 opposite-facing mirrors. The self-reflecting mirrors will create the illusion of repeating the words to infinity as well as implicating the viewers reflected in the mirrors. The convenience gallery storefront is an ideal location for this work. It is the intersection of the space of commerce and the private space of individual longing. The work speaks to our desires. Neon signs are familiar signifiers of commerce in an urban setting and the media advertising surrounding us promotes the economy of desire. Who doesn’t want something? Who hasn’t looked longingly at shop window?
Yvonne Singer is a practicing artist with an active national and international exhibition record. Her installation works employ multimedia techniques, often with cryptic texts to articulate cultural issues of disjuncture and perception. She is particularly interested in the intersection of public and private histories. Singer, a member of Loop Gallery, has served on several gallery, magazine, and art council boards and is on faculty in the Department of Visual Arts at York University where she is the former Graduate Program Director in visual arts.
Toni Hafkenscheid
Two Portraits of My Dad
archival inkjet (2010)
November 6 to December 4
I recently went back to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to visit my dad and help him move out of his apartment. Because my dad doesn’t come out to Toronto to see me, I only get to see him when I go back to Rotterdam, which is once a year. When I am back I am always shocked how his looks have changed in that one year.
For this piece at convenience I am showing two portraits of my dad. The first one is my dad on his bed taken in 1989 at age 64. The second one is my dad after having emptied his apartment to move to a home in October 2010 at age 85.
Both photographs are important moments in time for me: 1989, I decided leave the Netherlands to move to Canada; 2010, my dad is leaving his apartment after having lived there for 51 years.
Toni Hafkenscheid is a Toronto based photographer who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 1989, he graduated from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and shortly thereafter moved to Toronto. During the following six years he was active in the arts community in Toronto and received several Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council awards. In 1996 Toni moved back to the Netherlands to pursue a career as a commercial photographer and to teach photography at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
In 2002 Toni moved back to Toronto, Canada. He is currently teaching at OCAD in Toronto and Sheridan in Oakville. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Canada, the US, Japan, and Europe. His works reside in a number of important collections, including the Canadian Museum for Contemporary Photography (Ottawa), the University of Toronto, the Canada Council Art Bank, The Royal Bank Canada, the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art (Buffalo, NY), Kodak France and Kodak Netherlands, and various private collections. In Toronto, Toni is represented by the Birch Libralato Gallery.
The Invariant Set
Mass
mixed media installation (2010)
October 7 to November 5
www.theinvariantset.blogspot.com
This new installation by artist collective The Invariant Set (Anna Pantchev and James Gauvreau) is a sculptural interpretation of the Higgs Boson. The Higgs, or “god particle”, is a theoretical particle that physicists theorize imbues all other particles with their mass. In a broader sense, the piece deals with the notion that modern physics is inherently abstract, and that the two fields (art and science) find common ground in their motivations and practices.
While their previous work has been more than flat, it may be more accurate to call it 2.5-D as it has never quite escaped the walls. In this new piece, The Invariant Set have taken their first step into a fully-fledged three-dimensional space, hinting at a “science fair project” within an oversized diorama.
Presented in conjunction with Printopolis, a four-day symposium with an international focus on contemporary printmaking presented by Open Studio in Toronto, from October 21 to 24, 2010. www.openstudio.on.ca
Max Streicher
Romulus and Remus
nylon spinnaker, electric fans (2005)
September 8 to October 6
Romulus and Remus is a kinetic inflatable. It consists of two babies connected to one another by a flexible hose attached at the base of their spines. A fan within each baby fills them with air. A switch causes the fans to alternate every 30 to 45 seconds. When that happens air is pulled from one to inflate the other. This results in constant deflation and inflation.
Max Streicher is a sculptor and installation artist from Alberta, now residing in Toronto. Since 1989 he has worked extensively with inflatable technology in kinetic sculptures and installation works. He has shown widely across Canada in solo exhibitions in museums such as The Art Gallery of Ontario, Edmonton Art Gallery and the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. He has been part of group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; Power Plant Centre for contemporary Art, Toronto; and Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge. He has completed several international site-related projects in such places as Taichung, Taiwan; Erfurt, Germany; and Prague, Czech Republic. His inflatable works are in the collections of museums such as the ESSL Museum, Vienna; The Hara Museum, Tokyo; and Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton. He was a founding member of the Nethermind collective of artists who organized four large exhibitions in alternative spaces in Toronto between 1991 and 1995. Max Streicher is currently represented by Galerie Raquel Ponce, Madrid; Galerie Eric Mircher, Paris; Gallery Maskara in Mumbai, India; Felix Ringle Galerie in Düsseldorf; Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York; and Wagner + Partner in Berlin.
Dieter Janssen
Sky
photo drawings (2010)
August 10 to September 7
Sky, from the Ontario series, presents an image of the sky and nothing else. All reference points that could offer clues as to place and scale — trees, planes, buildings, birds or people — have been omitted. Instead, coloured gels designed for the manipulation of lighting effects in film and television are overlaid on the images.
Combining the filters with these images offers another means by which to index the view — that is, the interpretations that the viewers are projecting on the work. By making these interpretations materially explicit, the process of attributing place and scale becomes the experience.
Each image in the Ontario series engages a similar strategy of modified views, while the series’ title asks that they be
seen together.
Warren Quigley
Survival Store
mixed media installation (2010)
July 11 to August 9
contact: warrenlove@gmail.com
The Official Comprehensive Inclusive Strategic Instructive retail outlet for self-reliance, sustainability, and survival.
Warren Quigley has exhibited across Canada, the US, China, and in France, Brazil, and Japan. Recent exhibitions include Reverberation: 2008 International Video Art Exhibition at Yuangong Art Museum, Shanghai; at Tank Loft Contemporary Art Center, Chongqing; at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shijiazhuang, China; in Extreme Centre at centre culturel canadien, Paris, France; and as part of Sound Symposium in St. John’s, Newfoundland (in collaboration with Millie Chen); at FILE-Rio 2007: the Electronic Language International Festival, Telemar Cultural Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (in collaboration with the PED collective); Big Orbit Gallery, Buffalo; and Harbourfront Centre, Toronto. He is currently working on artist survival guides for Buffalo, Detroit, Toronto, and Normandie, France. He has produced a number of permanent public art commissions and his work is in private and public collections in Canada, the US, and Europe. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.
Louise deLorme
35P
mixed media (2010)
June 12 to July 9
contact: 35pseries@gmail.com
My work aspires to a condition of directness, openness of language, and interaction by use of direct pictorial means. 35P is part of The Transference Series, where I explore the expressive potential of mass media imagery that one is surrounded by in today’s media, street culture, and the cinematic. Political and mass consumerism materials are strategies of display from which I borrow to exploit the potential and communicative immediacy of images, codes, colour, and symbols. I recycle and combine images from diverse origins ranging from banking firm advertisements to political propaganda to entail different levels of visualization and provoke dissonances of content and form.
35P proposes an investigation of porn ads found in sports magazines published in the UK, 35P referring to the amount charged per minute for live telephonic sex talk. Somewhere between the visual and the sculptural, blank spaces, plays of reflection, and light/shadow effects serve to structure and transform each work into large mural-like elements. What interests me moreover is the context of leveling out that one can find in advertisement. By filtering this material through a new visual vocabulary, I recycle and engage in a new search of meaning, the traces of their origins revealed by their coarse pixellated finish.
Montreal-based artist Louise deLorme simultaneously pursues a disciplinary exploration of 2D and 3D media.
Brian Groombridge
Model (interior) of Piet Munson House, Utrecht, 1922–24
acrylic, MDF, adhesive labels (2010)
May 14 to June 11
www.susanhobbs.com/groombridge.html
Groombridge’s art is characterised by a deceptive simplicity of form and an economy of materials. His work makes evocative use of structural and poetic elements, including aspects of communication and perception, construction and measurement. His work is full of references to the transient nature of things, to balance, and to reciprocity. The sculpture at convenience explores a perceptual notion that he’s developed called ‘undeliverable space’ that arises from a continuing interest in dimensionless parameters.
Taiya Carleton
Sorry
video (2010)
April 14 to May 13
Have you ever wished that you could turn back time and stop all things from happening? Have you ever wondered what that would look like?
A video of a small accident is stuck in one frame on a video monitor which is placed in a street front window. When people walk by it starts to move. If they move in one direction the accident plays out normally, but if they walk in the other direction, time runs backwards and the accident reverses. Slow movements slow it down, fast movements speed it up. When pedestrians stop it freezes.
Time becomes unstuck and you are in control.
Taiya Carleton is a visual artist and a software engineer. She has studied at the Toronto School of Art and the Glasgow School of Art. She lives and works in Toronto.
Many thanks to Darryl Gold, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll and the White Corner Variety Store.
Jan Swinburne
Grid Shadows
sculptural relief (2010)
March 15 to April 13
contact: janswinburne@gmail.com
Grid Shadows is a sculptural relief constructed from common materials (duct tape, linoleum tiles, paint, and wood) that highlights the pervasive presence of grid structures and organizational systems. The work explores the rigid ideals of control and organization versus the realities of random events that frequently undermine that ideal. As with all Swinburne’s current works, the piece utilizes materials that rely on interplay with changing light sources.
Jan Swinburne has been exhibiting for 30 years both locally and in specific international projects. Swinburne’s practice is focused on painting but includes sculptural installation and published written works. Jan Swinburne lives and works in Toronto and is alumni of the Ontario College of Art and Design.
Adrian Blackwell
Casting Glances
mirror, plywood, motor, variable speed drive, steel frame (2010)
February 14 to March 14
contact: adrian.blackwell@utoronto.ca
A five foot diameter circular mirror hangs facing Lansdowne Avenue, leaning fifteen degrees off plane. Attached to a spindle and motor at its centre, so that it rotates 360 degrees every 12 hours, the speed of the hour hand of a clock. The mirror tells the time through the direction it leans: upwards at noon and midnight, north along Lansdowne at three, down towards the sidewalk at six and south towards queen at nine, in both morning and evening.
Adrian Blackwell is a visual artist and architectural and urban designer whose work has been exhibited at artist-run centres and museums across Canada. He is a member of the Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry and the editorial collective of the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture, Landscape and Political Economy. In 2009 he collaborated with Jane Hutton to design and build Dymaxion Sleep for the International Garden Festival in Metis, Quebec. He teaches architecture and urban design at the University of Toronto.
Thanks to Josh Hall, Alejandro López Hernandez and Gene Mastrangeli for fabrication and technical assistance.
Tori Foster
The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian
Video Loop (2009)
January 15 to February 13
www.torifoster.com
The Mother City is a series of typological works that juxtapose built form as conceived by architects with built form as experienced by the individual. Each installment represents cities across Canada and the United States using the architectural section as its medium for the exploration of urban form and experience.
The first in the series, The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian, is a mixed-media piece that depicts the trajectories of three individuals living in three different regions of Toronto. Simultaneously, it displays a section of Toronto from one edge of the metropolis to the other. Via sectional representation, The Impossibility of Understanding offers an opportunity to witness the form of the city as a whole, providing an entry point for understanding the relationships of its fragments.
Tori Foster is a media artist based in Toronto. Her work explores representations of experience through typology and space-time representation. Foster has been featured on the cover of Now, Xtra, and on MTV Canada.
Biliana Velkova
Holiday (Fill Your Home with the Spirit of the Season)
installation (2009)
December 16 to January 14
Holiday (Fill Your Home with the Spirit of the Season) is a continuation of Biliana Velkova’s research into marketing, appropriation and authorship issues. As advertising campaigns are borrowing from art concepts more frequently, the line between them becomes blurred. The project investigates the subliminal messages within advertising, the economic value of the holiday season, and the impossibility of achieving the lifestyle portrayed in various marketing campaigns. Holiday will take these ideas and apply them to a non-existent storefront, at convenience.
Biliana Velkova is a MFA graduate of the University of Saskatchewan, whose current interests focus on performance art, issues of identity, and the impact of advertising and the mainstream media on the everyday environment. She has exhibited locally and internationally.
Sara Graham
Department of Systems Oversight 1968-1973 (DSO)
Replica of DSO Reception, mixed media installation (2009)
November 16 to December 15
www.citymovement.ca
The Department of Systems Oversight 1968-1973 (DSO) installation at convenience—a replica of a DSO reception lobby—coincides with another DSO installation at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax. Both exhibitions show different aspects of the Department.
The Department of Systems Oversight was established in 1968 in response to the tremendous possibilities for social and cultural change that emerged within Western societies during the late 1960s. The DSO represented a consortium of seemingly mutually exclusive interests in politics, economics, the arts, architecture, logistics, transportation, agriculture, and myriad other concerns of Western democracies. The DSO was recognized as an ‘impartial’ global organization, a ‘watchdog’ charged to monitor and document how present and future societies shape and are shaped by systems. The DSO’s primary aim was to locate, analyse, and visualise data that examined not only the exchange, placement, course and direction within these systems but also the motility of the (infra)structures themselves. The DSO regarded all systems as equal in informational value and diagrammatic elegance and as outside of any logical hierarchical ordering; therefore any system could be analysed by any other system, since each was as important and as critical as any other to the analyses of the system that was in the process of being analysed. That is, the DSO revealed extremely diverse interconnections and cross-references between all established systems and those that may or may not come into being. The systemic changes it sought to chart and the interconnections between systems that it sought to manage provided the Department and its various departments with ever more complicated and expanding prospects for systems integration until it became buried under the weight of possibilities. Ultimately, the DSO failed and in 1973, at the onset of the global energy and economic crises, all of its departments were dissolved.
It was common practice for the DSO to set up lobby spaces in various locations such as storefronts, abandoned buildings, decommissioned bunkers and other unused or unuseable locations where it did not have any offices. There is speculation that this was done to create decoys that would effectively hide the real offices where the lobbies there would be assumed to be fakes. There are many theories as to why this was done—one to justify funding by providing false offices, another that the sensitivity of the information would make them a target of corporate and political espionage or, the most outlandish but perhaps the most accurate, that these lobbies were in fact portals to the ‘supersystem.’ The latter speculation was justified by the appearance of a seemingly nonfunctional yellow pipe in each location. The documentation of the DSO’s activities has, for the most part, been lost in the systems that it detailed during its existence. Pieces have emerged at the interstices of the systems that have been heaped atop its activities since its demise. As these old systems never die, the information about the DSO has not been destroyed and Department of Systems Oversight 1968-1973 has taken the form of a system to save this system.
Sara Graham’s practice investigates the contemporary city as subject matter. Her current work explores (and explodes) geographic fictions through the means and methods of architecture, urban planning and visual art. Graham’s cross-disciplinary approach incorporates philosophical, cultural, sociological and architectural criticism of the nature and condition of the city and urban life. Graham currently is exhibiting at Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax) and has an upcoming exhibition at Museum London. She has exhibited across Canada with recent exhibitions at Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Canadian Centre for Architecture Bookstore (Montreal), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (Kitchener) and MKG127 (Toronto).
Micah Lexier
Two Arrows Pointing In Opposite Directions
waterjet-cut aluminum, enamel paint (2009)
October 19 to November 15
Two Arrows Pointing In Opposite Directions, is a simple, graphic installation consisting of two large waterjet-cut aluminum arrows painted dark brown and mounted to the back wall of the gallery window space. The two arrows are in fact one arrow repeated twice. The piece references the fact that the gallery is situated on a two-way street, but it also connects to the various signs and symbols found on the street, including the No Standing sign, with its pair of arrows, located directly in front of the window space.
Two Arrows Pointing In Opposite Directions is a site-specific work made for convenience, but it is also part of a larger project based on this one hand-drawn arrow. In addition to the convenience gallery piece, Lexier presented an exhibition at Birch Libralato in both of the gallery’s spaces as well as on the outside of the building. The exhibition consisted of a large number of wall-mounted works, a vitrine piece, and a series of silk-screen prints all utilizing this arrow imagery. In addition, a number of commercial galleries in the city agreed to display one of the arrows in their back room or office.
Micah Lexier is a Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based artist. He curates occasionally and collects often—generally items made of paper, including out-of-print conceptual art documents, printed cardboard boxes and various items found on the street. Micah Lexier is represented by Gitte Weise Galerie in Berlin, TrepanierBaer in Calgary, and Birch Libralato in Toronto
Here in Grey Area, with the reduction of the map to a single layer of information—the public street and highway system—a surprisingly clear and complex reading remains. Because extraneous layers of prescribed information are removed, an understanding of place is possible. Through analysis of this pattern, a mix of cultural, geographical, social and political histories of Toronto can be unearthed.
From the original ten blocks that were the birth of the metropolis, to the subsequent surveying of the surrounding lands, and the final filling in of these super blocks, one can get a sense of how the City of Toronto grew to where it is today. The outlying villages that were eventually annexed and their modern day equivalents in the making of the megacity can still be discerned. The development of the first 20th century suburb of Don Mills is a distinct pattern that can be seen reproduced in areas further away from the city centre. Interestingly, as land has become more valuable, the density of the blocks in these recent suburbs often more closely resembles that of older areas downtown. But the meandering suburban street is still seeming more popular in these new developments than the regular grids of downtown.
In this map, the road system is represented as a sculptural relief, giving the organizing structure of the city its presence, and alluding to the containing and compartmentalizing nature of the system. Streets are of course absolute urban necessities for allowing us to move people and things at will, yet at the same time they act as boundaries, intentionally or not becoming lines within the grey area.
Flavio Trevisan is an artist working in Toronto. He was born in 1970 in Padova, Italy and was educated at the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1999. He is a founder and co-director of convenience gallery in Toronto.