In conjunction with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2019-2020 theme of Strange Weather, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto is pleased to present the exhibition Weather Amnesia. Curated by Daniels Faculty Master of Visual Studies (MVS) Curatorial student Yuluo Wei, the exhibition explores our changing environmental conditions through the lens of ten artists’ works and artefacts.

Opening with a reception on Wednesday, September 18 from 4-6pm, the exhibition continues to June 26, 2020 at the Jackman Humanities Institute.

With the onset of global climate change, weather patterns are becoming less predictable and reliable. Living within controlled urban environments, it is easy to forget (and even deny) the abundant evidence of change. The artists’ works included in Weather Amnesia offer visual insight into the profound disruptions that are under way. With strangeness becoming the new normal, the exhibition makes us wonder and think about what kind of future awaits us.

Image, top: Occupy by Tania Kitchell; Image, above: Pregnant Bird by Florence Vale

The exhibition includes works by: Lisa Hirmer, Tania Kitchell, Doris McCarthy, Rick McCarthy, David B. Milne, Graham Noble Norwell, Walter Phillips, Florence Vale, with Mass Timber, a Live Bird Migration Map, and a hygrothermograph.

The exhibition encompasses a broad range of works, including examples of landscape painting as well as contemporary photography and sculptural interpretations of a changing nature. Ranging from 1922 to 2019, Wei’s selection also includes works rarely seen from the University of Toronto Art Collection, the Hart House Collection and the University College Collection. Together, they stimulate considerations of humanity’s past and current relations to nature and on climate, and observe both, the effects of environmental degradation and the potential for collective response.

Presented in conjunction with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2019-2020 research theme Strange Weather.

About Yuluo Wei:
Yuluo Wei entered the MVS Curatorial Studies program at the Johh H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design with an economics and business background. Her passion for contemporary art stems from her work at the Robert Langen Art Gallery at Wilfrid Laurier University. The encounter with an abundance of artistic resources and the strong humanities focus on campus drew her into pursuing curatorial study. Yuluo was Youth Advisor to the Board of Directors for Art Awards Waterloo Region in 2017, and has been a writer and translator for the China Central Academy of Fine Arts since 2018. She assisted in curating the Chinese contemporary art exhibition emergence (Toronto, 2018) with Emerging Young Artists (EYA), and is currently collaborating with the Jackman Humanity Institute for its annual exhibition (Strange Weather, 2019-2020). In her research, she is interested in overlooked narratives embedded in myths, legends, and fairytales in a cross-cultural context. She is the 2019 recipient of the The Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award at the University of Toronto.

Opening Reception:
Wednesday, September 18, 2019, 4-6pm

Visitor Information:
September 18, 2019 – June 26, 2020
The Jackman Humanities Institute
170 St. George Street, 10th Floor
Monday to Friday, 9 am – 4 pm
Free and open to the public

For more information, please visit the Art Museum's website.

Media Contact: Sam Mogelonsky, sam.mogelosky@utoronto.ca

About the Art Museum at the University of Toronto:
The Art Museum is comprised of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House) and the University of Toronto Art Centre (University College). Located just a few steps apart, the two galleries were federated in 2014 and began operating under a new visual identity as the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, one of the largest gallery spaces for visual art exhibitions and programming in Toronto. Building on the two galleries’ distinguished histories, the Art Museum originates and organizes an intensive year-round program of exhibitions and events that foster—at a local, regional, and international level—innovative research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and knowledge of art and its histories befitting Canada’s leading university and the country’s largest city.

About the Jackman Humanities Institute:
The JHI advances humanities scholarship, generates interdisciplinary ways to understand human experience, and provides opportunities for scholars to learn from each other by creating new research and study networks (both virtual and physical) that complement and go beyond the mandates of individual disciplines, providing funding to faculty members to bring arts and humanities out of the classroom and into the public domain through events and exhibitions and offering scholarships to students and faculty at all career stages from all three University of Toronto campuses and other universities. We enable humanities research to reach outside the university walls and engage with the wider public.

The Institute's activities provide both graduate and undergraduate students with opportunities for one on one interaction with world-renowned humanists. In its focus on collaborative scholarship across academic boundaries, the Jackman Humanities Institute is designed to stimulate interaction among scholars, providing further impetus for innovative teaching and research projects. Through its breadth and inclusiveness, the Institute promotes the University of Toronto's participation as a leader in the humanities. The Jackman Humanities Institute is a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Our Supporters:
The Art Museum gratefully acknowledges the operating support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, with additional project support from the Jackman Humanities Institute

On June 5, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto will launch the exhibition Variations in Black, Queer, and Otherwise: Works by Abdi Osman.

A sessional lecturer in the Visual Studies program at the Daniels Faculty, Osman is a Somali-Canadian multidisciplinary Toronto-based artist whose work focuses on questions of African-ness and Black-ness in the diaspora. Curated by Dina Georgis and Sara Matthew, the multi-part exhibition incorporates sound, narrative, still and moving image, and fabric into his works, which offer complex iterations of subjectivity.

The exhibition will take place at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from June 5to July 27, 2019. Members of the public are invited to join the Art Museum for the opening reception on June 5 from 6-8pm. The artist and curators will be in attendance.

Osmanis an internationally recognized artist. His practice is documentary in nature, with a focus on portraiture. This exhibition at the Art Museum will include pieces from his extensive body of work focused on diaspora and histories of cultural mis-representation, including earlier photographic works from 2007 to his more recent video work in 2018.

For more information, visit the Art Museum website.

It is our great pleasure to announce Yuluo Wei as the 5th Annual Recipient of the Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award. The $5,000 Award recognizes exceptional work by a student in the first semester of Graduate Studies in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Visual Studies (MVS) Curatorial Studies program. Adjudicated by visual arts and curatorial faculty at the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto, prior recipients include cheyanne turions (2015), Jenn Goodwin (2016), Christophe Barbeau (2017), and Kate Whiteway (2019).  
 
About Yuluo Wei
Yuluo Wei entered the MVS Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto with an economics and business background. Her passion for contemporary art stems from her work at the Robert Langen Art Gallery at Wilfrid Laurier University. The encounter with an abundance of artistic resources and the strong humanities focus on campus drew her into pursuing curatorial study. Yuluo was Youth Advisor to the Board of Directors for Art Awards Waterloo Region in 2017, and has been a writer and translator for the China Central Academy of Fine Arts since 2018. She assisted in curating the Chinese contemporary art exhibition emergence (Toronto, 2018) with Emerging Young Artists (EYA), and is currently collaborating with the Jackman Humanity Institute for its annual exhibition (Strange Weather, 2019-2020). In her research, she is interested in overlooked narratives embedded in myths, legends, and fairytales in a cross-cultural context.

About the Award
The Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award was created by Reesa Greenberg, internationally renowned scholar on museums and exhibition studies, for the benefit of the students in the MVS Curatorial Studies Program and for the benefit of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, which is today part of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Greenberg’s donation provides an annual monetary award of $5,000 as well as an additional biannual award of $10,000 in support of international travel or a paid-internship position of students in the MVS Curatorial Studies Program in the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto.
 
About Reesa Greenberg
Reesa Greenberg is an art historian, independent scholar and museum consultant whose research focuses on exhibitions and display. She has consulted on exhibitions and installations for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Edmonton Art Gallery, the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam and Mirroring Evil at the Jewish Museum in New York. She is best known as co-editor (with Bruce Ferguson and Sandy Nairne) of Thinking About Exhibitions, Routledge, 1996 and the author of numerous articles on exhibition presentation and politics. Her recent research examines the web as an exhibition space. An alumnus of the University of Toronto Art History program, she is an Adjunct Professor at both Carleton University, Ottawa, and York University, Toronto.
 
About the Master of Visual Studies Curatorial Studies Program
Initiated in 2008, the Curatorial Studies stream in the MVS program at the University of Toronto is currently in its tenth year.  Embedded within a rich environment of study, teaching assistantships, internships and mentorship within the internationally renowned Daniels Faculty and the Art Museum at UofT, students immerse in recent developments in the visual arts, theory, and critical writing in an interdisciplinary context to support their research interests and curatorial engagement. In particular, the program focuses on the presentational challenges arising from the diverse and complex modes of contemporary art -- from material and historical artefacts to installation, from performance to image, text, sound, and digital media – within the broader context of contemporary global culture. Significantly, the program offers students the opportunity to produce their own Graduating Exhibition for public presentation within the professional context and support of the Art Museum on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto, and at the centre of Canada’s largest city.
 
The highly respected degree affords students access to a sustained professional network and mentorships. With an outstanding history of accomplishments of Graduating students’ exhibitions, graduates of our program continually achieve successful curatorial careers and institutional positions in Canada and internationally. They include directorial, curatorial and related positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Power Plant, the Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, the Esker Foundation and many others art institutions across Canada and around the world.
 
Recent examples of MVS Curatorial Studies Exhibitions:
•    http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/rehearsal-objects-lie-table/
•    http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/talking-back-otherwise/
•    http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/morning-star/
•    http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/far-near-distances-us/
•    http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/2017-university-toronto-mvs-cur…
•    https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/why-cant-minimal/
•    http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/all-this-time/
•    https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/sovereign-acts/
•    https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/learning-from-the-lake/
•    https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/islands/
•    https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/weight-of-light/

image above: Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter, Can You Hear Me?, 2014. Courtesy Wachter & Jud.

This summer the Art Museum at the University of Toronto is proud to present the graduating projects of the 2019 MVS Curatorial Studies program students, Lillian O’Brien Davis, Pegah Vaezi and Kate Whiteway. The three distinct projects explore themes ranging from activism and ethics on the internet to materiality and cultural interconnectivity in contemporary art in diverse local contexts.

What do we mean when we say ‘content moderation’? is an interdisciplinary symposium organized by Pegah Vaezi addressing urgent concerns regarding control of digital space within and beyond the art and creative communities in Canada and internationally. The symposium will explore three approaches as examples of artist- and tech-involved activism against two main and interconnected systems of oppression: artists as developers/co-developers of the Web’s Infrastructure; artistic “gestures” as activism against online censorship and surveillance; and storytelling — changing narratives through technology and science fiction.

The two-day event will take place on May 25 and 26, 2019 at Hart House and features Jillian C. York [Berlin] (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Skawennati [Montreal] (Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace), Mathias Jud, Berlin (Can you hear me?), Sarah Friend, Toronto/Berlin (Our Networks), Jonathan Penney, Halifax (Citizen Lab, Dalhousie University), Garry Ing, Toronto (OCAD University, Our Networks), Dante Sanchez, Toronto (Toronto Mesh), Connor Turland, Toronto (Holochain) and Dawn Walker, Toronto (University of Toronto).

Sojourner Truth Parsons,I know for sure nobody should be poor (for everyone who died in May), 2018, Acrylic, flashe, archival glue and canvas on canvas, 60 x 60”, Courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery

In the exhibition Common Place: Common-Place (June 5 – July 27), curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis, the artworks by Patrick Cruz, Erika DeFreitas, Catherine Telford Keogh, Walter Scott, and Sojourner Truth Parsons engage with notions of a common place through a variety of entry points by their works’ conceptual and material presences. Common Place: Common-Place considers the state of constant exchange in contemporary culture and its generative possibilities.

Catherine Telford Keogh’s sculptures contain data from previous moments; objects that are in and around us, deposits that slowly shift and change state over time, reacting in relation to each other. Erika DeFreitas’ video depicts a figure in constant movement, resisting a settled or permanent position along with the sound generated by her presence that permeates the space. Patrick Cruz’s wall painting engages with the gallery as ‘place’, a site for experimentation where presence is asserted by resisting the muting power of the white walls. Walter Scott’s humanoid sculptures extend into the gallery, the vulnerability and humour associated with their forms is a variation of representation, proposing alternate possibilities of perception. Sojourner Truth Parsons’ paintings work through the cacophony of existence, acting as memorials or visual representations of an emotional process, each painting becoming a site of exchange with and in response to the activity of the world.

Dagmara Genda, Limp Landscape, 2010, cut vinyl. Collection of Saskatchewan Arts Board. Image courtesy of the Mendel Art Gallery

In & Out of Saskatchewan (June 5 – July 27) is an exhibition about Saskatchewan in Toronto curated by Kate Whiteway. Selected artists’ works illuminate the conditions by which art from “peripheral” places is legitimized by travelling to and from “centres.”

Works by artists Pat Adams, Ryan Arnott, Tammi Campbell, Dagmara Genda, Roy Kiyooka, Kenneth Lochhead, William Perehudoff, Edward Poitras, Jon Vaughn, Theodore Wan offer alternate views on traditions associated with the Prairies, namely colour field abstraction, landscape painting and photography, weaving and ceramics. The exhibition spans several decades, bookmarked by the internationalism of the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops in the early 1960s and the opening of the public art museum, Remai Modern, in 2017.

These two institutions invited an international audience into the local context of Saskatchewan, shaping who and what is considered central to the imported and exported narratives of art in the province. Drawing from the collections of the University of Toronto and the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and including works sent directly from artists and mailed through the postal system, In & Out of Saskatchewan activates networks through which art travels. It questions what we might know about “Saskatchewan art,” and highlights the material and political conditions of the production and presentation of art elsewhere, here. The exhibition posits art practices that are not defined by their distance from the “centre,” but instead by correspondence, agency and travel.

These projects are produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto

Common Place: Common-Place
June 5 – July 27, 2019
University of Toronto Art Centre

In & Out of Saskatchewan
June 5 – July 27, 2019
University of Toronto Art Centre
 

Opening Reception
Wednesday, June 5, 2019, 6-8pm
 

Drop-In Tours
Tuesdays, 2pm
 

About the Art Museum at the University of Toronto
The Art Museum is comprised of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House) and the University of Toronto Art Centre (University College). Located just a few steps apart, the two galleries were federated in 2014 and began operating under a new visual identity as the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, one of the largest gallery spaces for visual art exhibitions and programming in Toronto.

Building on the two galleries’ distinguished histories, the Art Museum originates and organizes an intensive year-round program of exhibitions and events that foster—at a local, regional, and international level—innovative research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and knowledge of art and its histories befitting Canada’s leading university and the country’s largest city.

About the Daniels Faculty's Master of Visual Studies, Curatorial Studies Program
Initiated in 2008, the Curatorial Studies stream in the MVS program at the University of Toronto is currently in its tenth year.  Embedded within a rich environment of study, teaching assistantships, internships and mentorship within the internationally renowned Daniels Faculty and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, students immerse in recent developments in the visual arts, theory, and critical writing in an interdisciplinary context to support their research interests and curatorial engagement.

The program focuses on the presentational challenges arising from the diverse and complex modes of contemporary art — from material and historical artefacts to installation, from performance to image, text, sound, and digital media — within the broader context of contemporary global culture. Significantly, the program offers students the opportunity to produce their own Graduating Exhibition for public presentation within the professional context and support of the Art Museum on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto, and at the centre of Canada’s largest city.
 
The highly respected degree affords students access to a sustained professional network and mentorships. With an outstanding history of accomplishments of Graduating students’ exhibitions, graduates of our program continually achieve successful curatorial careers and institutional positions in Canada and internationally. They include directorial, curatorial and related positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Power Plant, the Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, the Esker Foundation and many others art institutions across Canada and around the world.

Our Supporters
The MVS Curatorial Studies Program gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Reesa Greenberg through the Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Awards. The Art Museum gratefully acknowledges operating support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, with additional project support from TD Insurance.

Assistant Professors Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters have been selected to participate in The Bentway's inaugural Artist Residency.

The Bentway is a unique and innovative public space that has transformed 1.75 kilometres underneath Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway into a new gathering place for Toronto's growing population.

From The Bentway's press release:

The initial residency, Sound and the City, will focus on the acoustic environment of The Bentway. The hum of the Gardiner Expressway above, the rush of passing trains to the north, the occasional cannon blasts from the Fort York grounds, and the general buzz from the surrounding city make The Bentway site rich acoustic territory. The artists will explore The Bentway as an instrument, experiment with the varied sonic environments along its length, and investigate new ways to interact with the site. The residency runs from April-August, and will include a series of public experiments, engagements and consultations.
 

“We’re excited to have the opportunity to work in such a singular acoustic environment,” said Akiyama and Peters. “The Gardiner is such an iconic and important entity in the city and we hope to enliven and alter the space in ways that will help to deepen our understandings of sound, space, and the built environment.”

With the first Artist Residency, The Bentway aims to expand the parameters defining sound art, the types of projects contributing to the discipline, and the way sound shapes the collective creative experience of Toronto. New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA), who have an extensive background in the field of experimental sound, will work with the artists and provide key expertise throughout the process.

This isn't the first time that artist and Visual Studies professor Mitchell Akiyama and designer, research and architecture professor Brady Peters have collaborated. The duo also designed the model Spatial Sonic Network for the University of Toronto Art Museum's Making Models exhibition.

Mitchell Akiyama’s eclectic body of work includes writings about sound, metaphors, animals, and media technologies; scores for film and dance; and objects and installations that trouble received ideas about history, perception, and sensory experience. He holds a PhD in communications from McGill University and an MFA from Concordia University, and is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.

Brady Peters’ design and research work successfully bridges technology and design. He specializes in architectural acoustics, environmental simulation, computational design, and digital fabrication, using computer programming, parametric modelling, and simulation to design performance-driven forms. Peters is an assistant Professor at the John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

The Bentway’s 2019 Artist Residency is presented by RBC.

For more information on The Beltway and its summer programming, visit its website.

Photo by Nic Lehoux

Pictured above: Charles Stankievech, director of the MVS program, with Dana Prieto, Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh, Sahar Te, and Miles Rufelds. Photo by Dominic Chan

The MVS Studio program provides a rich environment structured around new approaches to visual art production, art theory, critical writing and professional practice. Students in the program explore increasingly complex modes of visual expression through combinations of text, image, movement, sound and dynamic new electronic media. Core courses focus on contemporary art practice and theory, and students have ample opportunity to develop skills in a variety of projects and media.

For more information, visit the MVS, Studio program page.

Exhibition photos top of page by Dominic Chan. 1) Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh, 2) Dana Prieto, 3) Miles Rufelds, 4) Sahar Te

Associate Professor Brian Boigon is participating in the 12th edition of the Papier Contemporary Art Fair, which takes place April 25 to 28 in Montreal. Organized by the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC), Papier welcomes 46 major Canadian galleries at the Port of Montreal’s Grand Quay. Boigon is among the artists presented by Christie Contemporary, a Toronto-based gallery participating in the fair. His work, The Interopera, launched a Christie Contemporary in 2017.

A design theorist, artist, art director, writer and researcher, Boigon's main area of creative practice is in the field of science fiction and locomotive design. Originally trained as an architect, he has been involved with digital and pop up productions since 1994 when he was featured in WIRED magazine for the design of the first tween-based virtual avatar town called Spillville. 

For more information on the Papier Contemporary Art Fair, visit: www.papiermontreal.com

On Thursday, April 4, the Nicholas Metivier Gallery will launch the exhibition Once Removed — a series of new paintings by Visual Studies professor Joanne Tod. The gallery will host a talk with Tod and Marc Mayer on Saturday, April 13th at 2:00pm. The exhibition runs until April 27.

Tod has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past thirty years. Evolving from an early interest in Pop Art and documentary photography, she is widely known for her subject of social critique in the guise of high realism paintings.

Writes Catherine Osborne in an essay on Once Removed:

Her latest exhibition involves a  lot of shimmering metallic surfaces. There are close-ups of pressed tin — the kind used on ceilings in the Victorian era — as well as smaller paintings that depict, variously, a disco ball, a pair of copper fermenting tanks used in micro-breweries, and a burnished vessel of unknown lineage. Reflective surfaces have been a constant in Tod’s work for decades, and the effect never fails to draw the eye, which oscillates between taking in the overall image and studying the artist’s energetic brushstrokes up close.

Paintings, above: 1) Danny Green,  2) Jodie Meeks,  3) Pascal Siakam

Once Removed also includes portraits of the Toronto Raptors. "Tod has always been interested in portraiture as a way to capture moments that define our collective consciousness," writes Osborne. "Here, each NBA all-star is rendered from the neck up on a white background, then grouped on the wall to represent the entire team for the 2018–19 season. The format unites the 15 players, who in the real world are traded so quickly that two had already become free  agents before Tod could finish the work."

Her series Vanity Fair (2002), featured portraits of individuals from the Toronto art community posing as contemporary representatives of characters from William Thackeray’s 19th century satire. The exhibition Kingdom Come (2009) at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, examined notions of proprietary and moral rights, in relation to antiquities and museum holdings.

Between 2007 - 2011, Tod painted every Canadian soldier that fell in Afghanistan. The project, entitled Oh, Canada – A Lament, consisted of 6" x 5" portraits that were interspersed with other painted panels arranged to resemble a fragmented Canadian flag. The installation travelled to prominent galleries and museums across Canada including the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum and Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.

Tod's series Vanity Fair (2002), featured portraits of individuals from the Toronto art community posing as contemporary representatives of characters from William Thackeray’s 19th century satire. The exhibition Kingdom Come (2009) at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, examined notions of proprietary and moral rights, in relation to antiquities and museum holdings.

Between 2007 and 2011, Tod painted every Canadian soldier that fell in Afghanistan. The project, entitled Oh, Canada – A Lament, consisted of 6" x 5" portraits that were interspersed with other painted panels arranged to resemble a fragmented Canadian flag. The installation travelled to prominent galleries and museums across Canada including the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum and Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.

For more information on the exhibition, visit the Nicholas Metivier Gallery's website.

Paintings, top: 1) Hoop and Daisy,  2) Lavender Lux,  3) Malcolm Gladwell