Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto

Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto

September 6 – December 10, 2016 Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and University of Toronto Art Centre

Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto
Opening Reception: September 21, 6-8pm

Curated by Luis Jacob

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 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.

The exhibition signals the Art Museum’s continued, energetic engagement with art and artists in Toronto, to foster research and histories concerning sense of place.

The most comprehensive exhibition of its kind, Form Follows Fiction incorporates historical documents gathered from local archives, contemporary ephemera and artworks by: Kim Adams, David Anderson, Napo B, Carl Beam, Adrian Blackwell, Deanna Bowen, Peter Bowyer, David Buchan, Michael Buckland, Colin Campbell, James Carl, Ian Carr-Harris, Carlo Cesta, Paraskeva Clark, Wendy Coburn, John Collins, Carole Conde & Karl Beveridge, Greg Curnoe, Tom Dean, Bonnie Devine, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Keesic Douglas, Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten, Robert Gagen, General Idea, Janice Gurney, Frederick Hagan, Lawren Harris, Isobel Harry, Bobs Cogill Haworth, Karen Henderson, Robert Houle, Yvonne McKague Housser, John G. Howard, Oliver Husain, Rae Johnson, G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, Nobuo Kubota, Will Kwan, Suzy Lake, Michel Lambeth, Gordon Lebredt, Arthur Lismer, Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, Peter MacCallum, Annie MacDonell, Arnaud Maggs, John Marriott, Sandra Meigs, Olia Mishchenko, Kent Monkman, Bridget Moser, Charlie Murray and Thom Van der Zaag, Shelley Niro, Daniel Olson, Charles Pachter, Roula Partheniou, Christiane Pflug, Ed Pien, Jaan Poldaas, Public Studio, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Steve Reinke, Arthur Renwick, Mitch Robertson, Jon Sasaki, David Armstrong Six, Michael Snow, Lisa Steele, Tess Boudreau Taconis, Ho Tam, Jeff Thomas, Joanne Tod, The Toronto Ink Company, Harold Town, Kwan Tse, Camille Turner, Renée van Halm, Frederick Varley, Lorne Wagman, Joyce Wieland, Robert Wiens, Shirley Wiitasalo, and Tony Wilson.