Art Metropole

Feb. 2007 - 01 Apr. 2008

ADVERTISING BY ARTISTS

FOUR ARTISTS, FIVE PUBLICATIONS, FIFTEEN MONTHS

Curated by Andrew Zealley

FOUR ARTISTS
FIVE PUBLICATIONS
FIFTEEN MONTHS

CECILIA BERKOVIC
STEPHEN ELLWOOD
NESTOR KRUGER
YOKO ONO

BORDER CROSSINGS
BUTT
CABINET
THEY SHOOT HOMOS DONT THEY?
WIRE

ADVERTISING BY ARTISTS is an international print-media project conceived to draw attention to Art Metropole’s online presence and services – as well as a vehicle for the selected artists to express their own ideas. Over the coming 15-months, we look forward to challenging the conventions of advertising with pure imagination. The rules? Each ad-work must include Art Metropole’s logo and website address… the rest is… art. Welcome to Art Metropole. – Andrew Zealley, February 2007

CABINET Magazine (Issue 29, Spring 2008)

Cecilia Berkovic is an artist and graphic designer living in Toronto. She has been a member of service-oriented artist collective, Instant Coffee since 2001 and currently sits on the board of directors at Gallery TPW. Upcoming projects include a solo photo-based show at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in September 2007.

“My goal for this ad project was twofold. First, to create an ad that clearly illustrates who Art Metropole is and what they do; and secondly, as a vehicle to disseminate and recontextualize images I create, outside of conventional gallery spaces.

Non-for-profit organizations rarely have any kind of advertising budget so I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight what a unique organization Art Met is. I didn’t want to play with the conventions of an ad, I just wanted to use its familiar structure to create a good one.

The ad relies on the strength of the selected or created image in combination with copy to create interest, appeal and relevance for a specific audience (art speak) or target market (advertising babble). The images and copy used in the four ads will change slightly depending on the publication.

The Wire is an independent music magazine so I chose a detail from an ongoing series of mine entitled Public Displays of Affection, which clearly ties in with the musical theme of the publication. The image is composed of a series of second-hand cassette tapes which have most of the text scratched out of the titles, leaving only words that are names of places exposed. The “wish you were here” and “Toronto” texts subtly refer back to Art Metropole, while all the other locations, such as Berlin, New York and London speak to the international or global nature of music in general and this magazine specifically.” – Cecilia Berkovic, 2007

Stephen Ellwood‘s work uses language as a means for creating narratives and indexes in various formats, including video, books, posters, cards, wall works, and temporary installations. Typeset or handwritten on the wall, the words double as drawings, using language as a stand-in, and freestanding narratives, gleaned from hermetic and social experiences. Born in 1973, Stephen Ellwood lives and works in New York

Nestor Kruger is a Toronto based artist who has exhibited painting installations and animations in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally, most recently in a solo exhibition titled Out of Space: La photographie et l’imaginaire sculptural at Dazibao in Montreal, Quebec. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, for Present Tense at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and at Optica in Montreal. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Power Plant, Frankfurter Kunstverein and MuHKA in Antwerp, Belgium. Nestor Kruger is represented by goodwater gallery in Toronto, Canada.

“It’s an ink sketch of the table in my hotel room in Stockholm where I stayed last week. The table holds some papers, my laptop, headphones, mobile phone, lamp, drinking glass, and my Stanley laser measuring tool. I sketched this on a piece of paper that exactly matches the area of the ad space assigned to me so that there is a direct one to one correlation between the drawing and its re-presentation as an ad in the magazine.” – Nestor Kruger, April 27 2007

“The ad uses some conventions for page layout design, such as drop cap, pulled caption, illustration/photo captions, header and footer information and text columns. It was going to have an actual article inserted in the ad where the lines are now but I couldn’t come up with anything satisfactory. I tried to borrow most of my layout methods (strategies) from what I saw in Border Crossings so there should be a certain familiarity with the reader.

I had trouble with using the Art Metropole logo and web address without making everything seem like a conventional ad in the end. So, my thinking was to insert the ad into another page, a page I laid-out at a quarter the size, that way there is some question of scale, since the “ad” for art metropole is now an eighth of the scale rather than a quarter, but a full quarter page ad if in fact the page were at full scale. It is a kind of presumption or wish of how the ad “should” look while simultaneously being the ad itself.

The photo is from an article I read on a scambaiter (someone who scams scammers) who scammed a Nigerian into painting a butterfly on his face because she told him she was from the church of the sacred butterfly.

The pulled caption is a viewer’s comment/synopsis of the 1969 debate between William F. Buckley and Noam Chomsky that I watched on youtube.” – Nestor Kruger, 2007

Images

1: Yoko Ono, CABINET Magazine (Issue 29, Spring 2008).
2: Cecilia Berkovic, BORDER CROSSINGS (Vol.27, No.1, Winter 2008).
3: Stephen Ellwood, WIRE Magazine (Issue #287, January 2008).
4: Stephen Ellwood, BORDER CROSSINGS (Vol.26, No.4, Fall 2007).
5: Nestor Kruger, CABINET Magazine (Issue 28, Winter 2008).
6: Yoko One, BUTT (Issue 21, Autumn 2007).
7: Yoko One, WIRE Magazine (Issue #284, October 2007).
8: Cecilia Berkovic, THEY SHOOT HOMOS DONT THEY? (Issue 4, Summer 2007).
9: Stephen Ellwood, CABINET Magazine (Issue 26 Magic, Summer 2007).
10: Yoko One, BORDER CROSSINGS (Vol.26, No.2, Spring 2007).
11: Nestor Kruger, WIRE Magazine (Issue #280, June 2007).
12: Stephen Ellwood, BUTT (#19, Spring 2007).
13: Cecilia Berkovic, WIRE Magazine (Issue #277, March 2007).
14: Nestor Kruger, BORDER CROSSINGS (Vol.26, No.1, Winter 2007).

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