A suite of ten large-scale digital prints by Assistant Professor John Massey will be on display in the upcoming solo exhibition titled Black on White at Diaz Contemporary.

“Black on White combines physical collage and digital graphic processing, each work conveying a dense, layered turbulence,” writes Diaz in the exhibition description. “Base layer images are glimpsed through a buildup of black figures—letterforms, punctuation marks—meticulously applied to rhetorically animate the latent energy of a personal, ontological index of signs, gestures, and declared imperatives.”

The exhibition runs from October 14 to November 12, and will launch with an opening reception on October 14 from 6PM to 8PM. Diaz Contemporary is located at 100 Niagara Street, Toronto.

Since 1979, Massey has exhibited nationally and internationally while working in installation, video, photography, and sculpture. He has developed a collage language that embodies an emotional content while rigorously asking rhetorical and structural questions of his selected media.

Black on White expands on earlier works that were exhibited at the prestigious Montreal Biennale in 2014. La Biennale de Montréal described Massey’s artwork as presenting “an explosion of words: letters, numbers, punctuation marks bursting forward from a blank background.”

in/future — a multidisciplinary arts and music festival now on at Ontario Place in Toronto — features work by a number of Visual Studies faculty members, graduate students, and alumni from Daniels. The large, collaborative festival includes site-specific projects, musical performances, films and videos in Ontario Place’s iconic Cinesphere, and performances, workshops, talks, and tours.

Recently hired as an Associate Professor, Mitchell Akiyama has an installation entitled 108 Spectres of Release on the West Island; Ed Pien has occupied one of the weather silos with the immersive projection installation Revel; MVS alumni Faye Mullen (MVS 2013) performs daily at 7pm at Breaker Point; MVS Alumni Fraser McCallum (MVS 2016) and current MVS student Sam Cotter have curated 2 programs for Vtape (co-founded by MVS faculty Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak) that are screening in the Cinesphere; sessional lecturer Oliver Hussain’s 2-d and 3-d videos are screening in one of the amazing silos; and MVS Curatorial Studies graduate Wanda Nanibush (2013) and current MVS student Rouzbeh Akhbari are each speaking in the Onsite OCADU speakers series Lectures for the end of the world(s) on the West Island of Ontario Place.

in/future runs until September 25. Visit the in/future website, to view the schedule and ticket information.

Assistant Professor Ed Pien celebrated the launch of the solo exhibition Shadowed Land on September 22 at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.

Shadowed Land features new installation and video work in which Pien explores notions of sense memory and the irrepresentability of traumatic histories and loss. Incorporating photography, video, sound, light and kinetic installations, this body of work has grown out of Pien’s interest in concepts of disappearance and haunting, and probes ideas of being implicated, bearing witness, loss, mourning, resilience, and empathy.

Shawdowed Land runs until January 1, 2017.

Pien also has a piece in the Art Museum’s exhibition: Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto, curated by Visiting Professor Luis Jacob. The Toronto Star described his piece, Night Gathering, as “emblematic of the tangled undergrowth in which Toronto’s artistic culture has always thrived.”

Form Follows Fiction runs until December 10, 2016.

You can also still view Pien’s installation, Revel, at the in/future exhibition at Ontario Place.  in/future runs until September 25.

How do artists in Toronto visualize their sense of place? Are there particular made-in-Toronto ways of thinking about the city?

Curated by internationally renowned Toronto-based artist — and current Visiting Professor at the Daniels Faculty — Luis Jacob, Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto concentrates on a period of more than fifty years to consider the ways in which artists visualize Toronto. Presenting a thematic clustering of works by eighty-six artists, the exhibition is premised on the tendency of artists in this city to favour performative and allegorical procedures to articulate their sense of place. Four gestures — mapping, modelling, performing and congregating — serve as guideposts to a diverse array of artistic practices. The exhibition is a constellation of symbolic forms, or memes, that repeatedly appear in the work of artists of different generations; it presents a panorama of the blueprints that artists have drafted over many decades to give form to life in one of North America’s largest cities.

Writes Murray Whyte, visual arts critic at the Toronto Star:

Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto” is a curious indulgence in broad, inclusive — and very, very long — cultural history in a place that has typically worn its amnesia like a badge of honour. Indeed, the exhibition, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Art Museum and curated with loving care by Luis Jacob, an artist with an admirably stubborn devotion to our forward-looking hometown, offers a very different view.

 

FORM FOLLOWS FICTION: ART AND ARTISTS IN TORONTO
Curated by Luis Jacob
Art Museum at the University of Toronto
September 6 to December 10, 2016

For more information on this exhibition and related programs, visit the University of Toronto Art Centre website.

Other current and upcoming exhibitions featuring Luis Jacob's work:

Le Grand Balcon 
curated by Philippe Pirotte
La Biennale de Montréal
October 19, 2016 to January 15 January, 2017

Yonder
curated by Matthew Brower and Mona Filip
Koffler Centre of the Arts, Toronto
September 21 to November 27, 2016

Response
curated by Vincent Bonin
Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides
September 6 to November 6, 2016

Interprétations à l’oeuvre
curated by Mathilde Guyon and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre
Astérides, Marseille
August 27 to November 27, 2016

Acting under her new title as Assistant Curator of Indigenous Art, alumna Wanda Nanibush (MVS 2012) recently launched the exhibition titled Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The show focuses on the experimentation, the cultural diversity, and the potential of Toronto.

Reflecting on Toronto as a cultural space, the exhibition features the experimental energy of the city’s art scene between 1971 and 1989 and particularly on “the era’s preoccupation with ideas of performance, the body, the image, self-portraiture, storytelling, and representation.” The thematically organized exhibit makes references to Toronto and its cityscape and features works that pushes the boundaries of conventional art-making from painting, sculpture, and photography to video, installation and performance.

Bringing together over 100 works by 65 artists, the show features a number of Daniels faculty including Joanne Tod, John Massey, Shirley Wiitasalo, and Lisa Steele + Kim Tomczak.  

Throughout its run, the show will cycle new commissions and host a series of performances and events at the AGO’S Signy Eaton Gallery. The series began with Rebecca Belmore’s performance during Nuit Blanche, followed by a performance by Walter Scott on October 6^th.

The show runs until May 7th 2016. Visit the AGO’s webpage for more information. 

After serving a three-year tenure as Artistic Director at Trinity Square Video, Master of Visual Studies, Curatorial graduate John G. Hampton (MVS 2014) has been announced as the Executive Director for the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (AGSM).

“I am humbled and honoured to be trusted with the leadership of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, an institution that holds such a vital position within its community,” said Hampton in a press release. “The AGSM has long impressed me with the strength of its programming, and its forward looking commitment to the ethics of exhibition and display.”

In addition to this new position, Hampton is a member of the Aboriginal Education Council at OCAD University, and an outgoing board member for Mercer Union in Toronto. During his time at Trinity Square Video, Hampton also acted as the Aboriginal Curator in Residence at the Art Museum at U of T, and has previously served as a board member for Queer City Cinema and Holophon Sound Art Collective in Regina, SK.

AGSM Board of Directors Chair Marnie Evans said about Hampton: “We are excited to have him on the team and we are confident that he will continue to advance the AGSM’s mission of leading and inspiring community engagement through contemporary art exhibitions, education, and events.”

While Hampton was still enrolled in the MVS program, he was profiled by Now magazine for its monthly education and career training feature "Class Action" about his experience as a student.

Says Hampton:

The program helps with the intellectual aspects of being a curator. A big part of the job is framing contemporary artwork through writing and how you speak about it. The university is well suited to train you for that. Access to the various departments at the University of Toronto – the program is interdisciplinary – means you can seek out the types of advisers you need. I’m taking classes in the philosophy department and in museum studies to gain administrative-type skills.
 

For the full article, visit Now’s website.

Two weeks ago, an group of architects and artists came together for the Building Museums: Building Cities (Part 2) panel discussion at the Art Museum; among them were Daniels Faculty alumni Adrian Blackwell (MUD 2002) and Shirley Blumberg (BArch 1976), as well as Dean Richard Sommer. Other panelists included French architect Eric Lapierre, Charles Renfro of New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Paris-based writer and critic Philippe Trétiack. The panel was introduced by Associate Professor Barbara Fischer.

The discussion centred on the changing museum culture in light of international development and its effect on urban renewal and gentrification. Part 1 of the Building Museums: Building Cities events, which took place last year, considered Toronto’s recent cultural building revival, the surge of large capital projects, and the renewals of museum spaces currently developing across Canada.

This year’s event was recently covered by U of T News: “Imagine Toronto without the Royal Ontario Museum or the Art Gallery of Ontario,” writes Romi Levine. “The ROM’s Lee-Chin Crystal and Frank Gehry’s long glass and wood façade at the AGO have reached iconic status in the city – and Toronto would feel emptier without them. The buildings themselves have become as important as the artifacts they house.”

As Levine writes, attendees of the event included students, alumni, and professionals in the architecture and curatorial fields. “For attendee Cynthia Roberts, who holds a Masters of Museum Studies from U of T, the event highlighted the importance of talking about art and architecture so that decision makers are aware of its importance and the need for funding."

The event was organized by Fischer and the staff of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and was a joint initiative between the Art Museum and the French Consulate of Toronto with additional support by the Institut français.

For the full article, visit the U of T News website.

Earlier this year, alumna Victoria Taylor (MLA 2008) co-founded and co-curated ====\\DeRAIL Platform for Art and Architecture with designer and public art curator, Gelareh Saadapajouh. ====\\DeRAIL is a curated program of site-specific exhibitions, events, competitions, and publications with a mission to foster, support, interpret, celebrate, and expand public understanding around placemaking, landscape, and urbanism. It aims to provide an alternative platform for dialogue and collaboration across disciplinary, geographical, and ideological boundaries at the intersection of contemporary art and architecture. Taylor and Saadapajouh’s vision for the program is to inspire Toronto to expand the public dialogue around contemporary art, placemaking, landscape, and urbanism.

For its inaugural commission in Spring 2016, ====\\DeRAIL presented the installation titled MOBILE INK FACTORY by Jason Logan of Toronto Ink Company. Through the Doors Open weekend, Logan led participants along a section of the West Toronto Railpath park to learn about the unique character of this urban ecosystem, and then invited participants to make ink from the natural and handmade elements collected during the exploratory walks. The bottles of ink were kept as a souvenir of place, time, and experience. Educational, playful and participatory, MOBILE INK FACTORY drew attention to biodiversity and the inherent colours of the West Toronto Railpath park to celebrate new ways of understanding a familiar place beyond its usual functionality. For photos of the event, click here.

Taylor was recently interviewed by Metro News Toronto for her work with Landscape Punctures – a project that encourages residents to make their laneways greener by using “crack mix.” The special horticultural blend contains durable plant seeds that can grow with little maintenance.

“Through the Laneway Puncture, community volunteers get together and dig punctures in the middle of a laneway, where they place the plants,” writes Gilbert Ngabo for Metro News Toronto. “As many as 250 km of laneways will be part of the project.”

Alumna Erika DeFreitas (MVS 2008) is the recipient of the $5000 Finalist Artist Prize from the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts (TFVA).

“It is such an honor to be a finalist among so many inspiring cultural producers,” says DeFreitas of the announcement.

As a Toronto-based multidisciplinary conceptual artist, DeFreitas explores the influence of language, loss and culture on the formation of identity through public intervention, textile-based works, and performative actions that are photographed, placing an emphasis on process, gesture and documentation. Her work was included in the recent exhibition Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table at UofT’s Art Museum.

Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts is an independent non-profit organization founded in 1998. The organization gives financial support to the visual arts in the greater Toronto area and provides an educational program for its members. TFVA has now given $555,000 to the GTA arts community since its inception. This year, TFVA also awarded artists Miai Sutnik, vsvsvs (a seven person collective), Bridget Moser, Zun Lee, Showroom (an exhibition at the Art Museum), Chroma Lives (an exhibition and research project by Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston-Herterich), and Vtape (an arts space co-founded by Professor Lisa Steele and Associate Professor Kim Tomczak).

On April 5^th, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced Deanna Bowen (MVS 2008) one of the recipients of the 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Deanna Bowen is a descendant of the Alabama- and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneers of Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works have been shown in Canada, the US, and Europe in numerous film festivals and galleries. Bowen currently teaches studio, video art and documentary production in the Department of Arts, Culture & Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

In 2013, Bowen’s exhibit at the Art Gallery of York University exploring the Ku Klux Klan’s role in 20th century Canadian history caused “people who pass by everyday to literally trip over themselves.” Bowen had strategically made use of the violent white supremacist banners to spark a conversation on campus.

“A project in mapping African diasporic movement and a genealogical investigation in equal measure, my autobiographical, process-driven interdisciplinary practice is concerned with the document and the act of witnessing,” writes Bowen. “My practice revolves around the research and creation of conceptually rooted works that draw upon interrogations of personal and community based genealogical research, local and international 'domestic' histories, American slavery, Migration & Diaspora studies, Trauma theory and corollary discussions of memory and testimony, Southern Gothic Literature, and contemporary debates about political/personal art production.”

The Foundation awarded Bowen with the Fellowship for her “repertoire of artistic gestures” that “define the Black body and trace its present and movement in place and time.”

“In recent years, her work has involved rigorous examination of her family lineage and their connections to the Black Prairie pioneers of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Creek Negroes (Black Indians) and All-Black towns of Oklahoma, the extended Kentucky/Kansas Exoduster migrations, and the Ku Klux Klan,” writes the Guggenheim Foundation. “Her works and interventionist practice have garnered significant critical regard internationally.”

Often characterized as “midcareer” awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to scholars, artists, and scientists who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.