Foundations Studio

Category: Toronto Gallery Field Trip

  • Field Trip to Toronto

    The Power Plant

    www.thepowerplant.org

    The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery a Canadian non-collecting public gallery devoted to contemporary art, located in Toronto, Ontario at Harbourfront Centre.

    Hajra Waheed: Hold Everything Dear

    “Hold Everything Dear” takes a single form — the spiral — as a starting point to reflect on processes of upheaval in human experience. Partly inspired by a collection of essays on survival and resistance by art critic and novelist John Berger, the works act as a meditation on undefeated despair and the possibilities for radical hope.

    thepowerplant.org

    Naeem Mohaiemen: What we found after you left

    “Tripoli Cancelled” was shot on location at Ellinikon Airport, Athens’ former international airport which closed in 2001 when a new airport was built for the 2004 Olympic Games. After making the film, Mohaimen ran workshops in which the photographers, most too young to have ever flown from Ellinikon Airport while it was in operation, visited the airport, many for the first time, and produced their own documents of left-overs, milestones, and glimmers of a future.

    thepoweplant.org

    Vincent Meessen: Blues Klair

    It is an alternative way to read history through colour, ultramarine referring all at once to a pigment, overseas territories, trade, colonial and slave routes.

    thepowerplant.org

    Rashid Johnson: Anxious Audience

    Johnson’s work harnesses the rich symbolism and histories of varied materials that have personal meaning and at times are signifiers of greater African-American cultural identity.

    thepowerplant.org

    “Impulse” at Harbourfront Centre

    As you soar through the air, you’ll activate the light and sound sequences of Impulse; thus becoming the musician and artist of your own artistic creation.

    winterstationspresents.com

    MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Toronto

    www.museumofcontemporaryart.ca

    MOCA Toronto is a museum and art gallery with a mission to “exhibit, research, collect and nurture innovative contemporary art and cultural practices that engage with and address issues and themes relevant to our times.”

    Andreas Angelidakis: DEMOS – A Reconstruction

    While soft and lightweight, the modules explore powerful ideas around both architectural and colonial legacies as well as our relationship with computer coding and future technologies.

    moca.ca

    Age of You: An exhibition curated by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist

    “Age of You” is a timely exhibition about how the self has become more extreme, and what it means to be an individual today.

    moca.ca

    Shezad Dawood: Leviathan

    Project Website: leviathan-cycle.com

    “Leviathan” brings together marine biologists, oceanographers, political scientists, neurologists and trauma specialists to envision a future, which is unnervingly very much like our present, to consider possible links between borders, mental health and marine welfare.

    moca.ca

  • Toronto Gallery Trip – Fall 2018

    Gallery TPW

    Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, 
    Chandra Melting Tallow, Tania Willard


    Emphasizing invisible labour and Indigenous-led economies, Coney Island Baby features a collaborative film project by Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow and Tania Willard, with cinematographers Amy Kazymerchyk and Aaron Leon. Filmed during a December excursion to BUSH gallery on the territory of the Secwépemc Nation—in the interior of British Columbia—Coney Island Baby follows the artists as they learn how to snare wild rabbits. As they work towards a vital skillset often performed by women in Indigenous communities, the film questions what shared forms of sustenance can propose alternatives to capitalism.

    MKG127 is pleased to present Everything and Nothing, an exhibition of new work by Adam David Brown
    Opening Saturday, October 20, 2-5 PM

    In Everything and Nothing, Adam David Brown explores the concepts of time and place through emblematic structures such as lunar cycles, lines of latitude and core samples. Employing postage stamps, smoke drawings and lunar photography, Brown engages with how our beliefs and perceptions can be shaped by imaginary objects such as the equator- a perceptual line which, though represented as 0 degrees, encompasses everything yet functions as a zero, a non-space or merely a point of departure.

    Adam David Brown is a multidisciplinary artist living in Toronto, Canada. His work is guided by the principle of “less is more”, and is frequently generated by his interest in science, language and ephemerality. He has exhibited his work in Canada, Europe, Central America and the United States. His work is held in numerous public, corporate and private collections in both Canada and the USA.

    Museum of Contemporary Art

    We invite you to come and play with us on Floor 1, which is always free to the public. Andreas Angelidakis’s DEMOS – A Reconstruction is an installation of 74 foam modules that visitors of all ages can move and rearrange. While soft and lightweight, the modules explore powerful ideas around both architectural and colonial legacies as well as our relationship with computer coding and future technologies.

    Everyone is welcome to respond by creating a seat, a stage or even a monument. Each demo is then demolished to make way for the next DEMOS.

    DEMOS – A Reconstruction is MOCA’s first Invitation Project, a series of site-responsive installations that straddle the disciplines of art, architecture and psychology to explore the formation of social space.

    Create your own DEMOS

    Maya Stovall

    Liquor Store Theatre, included in the Whitney Biennial 2017, is a four-years-running, four-volume, twenty episode video series, forming a meditation on city life in a Detroit neighborhood. The series includes moving and still image works from 2014-2017, and may be continued at any time.

    In Liquor Store Theatre, for four years, I staged and documented performances and discussions in the streets, sidewalks, and parking lots surrounding the eight liquor stores in the McDougall-Hunt zone, where I also lived.

    Ewol Erizku

  • Nuit Blanche!!!

    Nuit Blanche in Toronto this Saturday!

  • Deanna Bowen & Jon Sasaki

    Deanna Bowen

    “On Trial The Long Doorway re-inserts this forgotten teledrama into the present day. The galleries of Mercer Union are transformed into a series of sets (a jail cell, a legal aid office, a living room, a locker room and court house) for live rehearsals and recordings to take place every Saturday for its duration. These rehearsals take place amongst archival documents from the era, from Canadian documentaries exploring race relations and University of Toronto’s The Varsity, to Life magazine’s coverage of the Emmett Till murder trial. The script will be animated by five Black actors, multiplying their roles and representations, while blurring the lines between black and white, rehearsal, action and performance. As curator Liz Park has written “The political potency of Bowen’s work lies in her ability to recharge the power of historic and archival documents.”[3] On Trial The Long Doorway is an installation and ‘performed production’ work that uses the gallery space as a set for rehearsals and present day video production of the teledrama, from audition, to rehearsals, to final shot.

    In delineating the necessity of “wake work” (connecting the experience of enslavement to contemporary violence, mourning, survival, and happiness) writer Christina Sharpe argues “toward inhabiting a black consciousness that would rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and physical death.”[4] The antagonisms, divisions and traumas, of race relations in the 1956 teledrama re-staged in 2017 are even more urgent today”.

    http://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/deanna-bowen-on-trial-the-long-doorway/

    Photos: http://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/deanna-bowen-on-trial-the-long-doorway/

    Jon Sasaki

    “Clint Roenisch is pleased to open the fall season with a solo show of recent works by the Canadian artist Jon Sasaki, his first with the gallery. Widely known as a “Romantic conceptualist,” Sasaki’s many projects, videos, photographs, performances, objects and installations often revolve around trying to reach dubious goals through perversely optimistic means. Sasaki seems to court failure as a richer, more revealing outcome than the soundest of victories. His tragicomic endeavours, ridiculous as they might be, are propelled by a warm, positivist worldview, particularly if the works involve, as they often do, a collaborative audience or cohorts willing to work towards whatever absurd (or noble) premise the artist has set his studied sights upon. The humour and fallibility embedded in his various works are anchored by a methodical, reasoned approach, in the same vein as the sight gags and complex scenes in a Buster Keaton film. In Sasaki’s hands, expectation and outcome never seem to align, generating a simultaneous sense of pathos and levity. His self-exhaustive systems are caught in cycles of trial and error. The humour and melancholy shot through the works of Bas Jan Ader, find echoes in Sasaki’s, just as the exuberant, funny, often explosive video works of Roman Signer serve as beacons. Sasaki also continues to bend Canadian art history to his will, especially the sublime achievements of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Their enduring, monolithic hold on Canadian artistic consciousness is a deep vein to be mined, to alternately pay homage to
    or to nudge into contemporary reality where hydro cables, gas stations, crowds and cell phone towers have come to mar the experience.

    The exhibition title is a quote borrowed from Michael Nesmith, the American singer, songwriter, actor, Monkee and heir to the Liquid Paper fortune. We may never know what his word was, it is likely lost to history, returned to whatever dreamspace it came from. What we do know is that Michael’s mother, Bette Nesmith Graham invented her Liquid Paper typewriter correction fluid using the family’s kitchen blender, improvising through trial and error a tool that would allow typists to revise, redact, and correct all imperfections. The desire to undo, re-do, mend broken connections (whether in a typewritten sentence or in a broader sense) figures prominently in
    this exhibition, which continues the artists’s investigation into the tropes of Romanticism”.

    http://clintroenisch.com/exhibitions/i-coined-a-word-the-other-day-but-i-forgot-what-it-was-it-was-a-good-one-it-came-to-me-in-a-dream/

    http://clintroenisch.com/artists/jon-sasaki/