Art Metropole

Terence Koh (born 1977 in Beijing, China) is a Canadian artist. Koh creates handmade books and zines, prints, photographs, sculptures, performances, and installations. Much of his diverse work involves queer, punk, and pornographic sensibilities. Koh has also worked under the alias “asianpunkboy”, though it appears that name has been retired as of 2009. In 2008, he was listed in Out magazine’s “Out 100 People of the Year”.

Koh was raised in Mississauga, Ontario, and lives in New York City. He is a Chinese-Canadian artist who received his Bachelor degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver.

Terence Koh was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2008. He has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. Koh’s work has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions including Love for Eternity, a mid-career retrospective at MUSAC (Leon, Spain); Captain Buddha, Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany); Dirty Blind God, de Pury & Luxembourg, (Zurich, Switzerland); Terence Koh Whitney Museum of American Art, (New York).

In the tradition of Piero Manzoni, Koh has gold-plated and sold his own feces for a total of $500,000.00 to collectors. He is represented by Javier Peres of in Los Angeles and Berlin, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg and Paris.

In 2008 he created the Terence Koh Show on YouTube, in which visitors to his home are either interviewed by Koh, or interview Koh themselves. Each show is usually not more than a few minutes in length. Some episodes are more abstract, such as when he plays the video forward but edits the sound to play backwards. Notable guests have included Marina Abramović, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and most recently, Lady Gaga. In the clip with Lady Gaga titled 88 pearls, Koh counts a bowl of pearls with Lady Gaga, who is wearing a costume inspired by Koh’s sculpture from his project Boy By The Sea. Koh’s affiliation with the pop star began at the 2010 Grammys, where Lady Gaga performed on a piano designed by Koh specifically for the occasion.

Koh’s work has been associated with New Gothic Art.

In nothingtoodoo, his first solo show at the Mary Boone Gallery, Koh, “dressed in white pajamalike clothes, slowly circl[es] a beautiful cone-shaped pile of rocky solar salt — 8 feet high and 24 feet across — on his knees.” So Roberta Smith described the work in an appreciative March, 2011, review. “This is performance art reduced to a bare and relentless rite in a space that has been stripped down to a kind of temple. (Its regal proportions help.) … Maybe the work is an extended apology for past bad-boy behavior.

(from wikipedia)

Dave Allen (Glasgow, UK) currently lives and works in Berlin, where he co-edits the Berlin art fanzine Neue Review and plays in the Berlin-based pop band Dominique. Allen received his MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1994, attended Cal Arts in 1993, and has exhibited internationally since 1989. Past exhibitions include Hee-Haw Cries the Young Komponist Dave Allen at The Showroom, London UK, 2001; Jammed at Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, 2003; and Club Transmediale 05, Berlin.

Barbara Bloom was born in Los Angeles in 1951 and lives in New York. She studied with John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts and is often associated with the postmodern “Pictures Generation” that includes Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger. The Reign of Narcissism (1989), perhaps Bloom’s most celebrated piece, recreates a Neoclassical period room in an imaginary museum dedicated to the artist’s self-image. She is also widely known for her 1994 permanent installation of Thonet bentwood chairs at the Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna. An extensive survey of her work, The Collections of Barbara Bloom, was shown in 2008 at the International Center for Photography, New York and at Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin.

Bill Burns was born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1957 and has lived and worked as an artist in Toronto, Canada and London, England. His work consists mainly of conceptual writings, artists’ books and multiples. He studied under Gerard Hemsworth, Jon Thompson and John Latham at Goldsmiths College in London, England. He is known for his Safety Gear for Small Animals (SGSA) which was first shown at 303 Gallery in New York in 1994 and later at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005/2006 and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2008. His 2002 project Everything I Could Buy on eBay About Malaria which was shown at the Wellcome Trust in London, England is considered a seminal work in the area of electronic collecting. His work about life in the art world known as Veblen Goods was shown at MASS MoCA in 2012.

Burns has published numerous books including When Pain Strikes (Burns, Busby, Sawchuk), a critical anthology about pain and pain relief, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1999. Other book titles include Analgesia (Rochefort,Montreal, 1993), How to Help Animals Escape from Degraded Habitats (Optica, Montreal, 1996), Urban Fauna Information Station (Mercer Union, Toronto, 2002), Safety Gear for Small Animals (MOCCA, Toronto and California State University, Fullerton, 2005) Bird Radio (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, Cologne, 2007) and The Flora and Fauna Information Service – 0.800.0.0FAUNA0FLORA (ICA, London, 2008). Burns has also published dozens of guides, posters, and editions. His editions are included in major museum collections throughout the world.

Burns’ work has been exhibited in major museums and biennial exhibitions since the nineteen nineties. His most notable exhibitions include the ICA in London, the MoMA in New York as well as Forum Arte y Vida at the Havana Bienal in Havana, Cuba in 2003, the Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina in 2007 and the Quebec City Biennial – Manif d’art 5, in 2010.

Based in Toronto, James Carl is one of the city’s leading artists. He creates small- and large-scale sculpture, made from a wide range of materials, from cardboard to marble, to venetian blinds. In the early 1990s Carl entered the art scene in Montreal by crafting expensive consumer goods (washing machines, stoves) from inexpensive materials such as found cardboard, only to place the finished sculptures back on the streets where their materials were originally retrieved. In a subsequent body of work, Carl carved replicas of disposable electronics out of marble – a traditional sculptor’s material with connotations of permanence. Most recently, Carl constructs large-scale, amorphous sculptures by intricately weaving brightly coloured venetian blinds in a series titled jalousie.

Carl has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Most recently, the first major survey of his work, entitled do you know what, was presented at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, the Cambridge Galleries Queen’s Square and the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph. Other recent shows include: jalousie at Galerie Heinz-Martin Weigand in Karlsruhe, Germany; negative spaces at Florence Loewy in Paris; plot at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, and bottom feeder at Mercer Union in Toronto. Carl earned his MFA from Rutgers University and has degrees from McGill, the University of Victoria and the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. His work is in public and private collections across North America and Europe. Currently, Carl is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Guelph.

Martin Creed is a sculptor, installation artist and conceptual artist. He studied in London at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1990. His work plays on definitions of art, using techniques reminiscent of those employed by Marcel Duchamp in his presentation of objects and ideas. Work #11 (1989; AC England Col.), consisting of two bronze objects, served as the basis for photographs of these objects in various situations: on a bar, in a dentist’s surgery, amongst Christmas decorations and in a dishwasher (Work #43, 1990–96; see 2000 exh. cat.). It is the placement of the objects, rather than their intrinsic qualities, that qualifies their meaning. In Work #79 (1993; see 2000 exh. cat.), a piece of Blu-Tack is rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall: the slightness of the gesture and its humorous inadequacy as a constructed object calls into question the nature of sculpture. In 1994 Creed formed a band called Owada, which he used as a parallel forum to his visual art practice. One of his best-known visual works, Work #200–202 (exh. New York, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 1998), known as Half the Air in a Given Space, consists of a gallery half-filled with balloons, creating a physical experience for the visitor of what that volume of air actually feels like. Creed also displayed slogans in the form of neon signs; the phrase ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’, was emblazoned on the fac`ade of Tate Britain in 2000.

(from Tate website)

Geoffrey Farmer is known internationally for producing large-scale mixed media projects that are characterized by their process-based methodology and grounded in meticulous research and conceptual rigour. Farmer creates structures that transform and activate the gallery space, incorporating objects that are often in a state of flux. Specific literary or cinematic narratives anchor the works, which are continually revised, altered and adapted from exhibition to exhibition, even within the same work. These multiple narratives are used to conceptually generate and contextualize the processes and materials produced, acquired and presented. Geoffrey Farmer has had solo exhibitions at The Power Plant, (Toronto), Contemporary Art Gallery, (Vancouver), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), with forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Drawing Room, London, England (2007), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2007) and the Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008).

Group shows include the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (Antwerp), Gasworks (London), Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh), Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul), Melbourne International Biennial (Melbourne). With upcoming group exhibitions, Crack the Sky, The Biennial de Montréal (2007) and The World’s A Stage at the Tate Modern, London, England (2007).

Farmer is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

My name is Anne Fauteux. I am a visual artist, jeweller, designer and singer based both in Montreal and Toronto.

After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal (1983), I spent one year in Italy to do a jewellery apprenticeship. Then I moved to London UK where I set up my first jewellery studio on the Thames River. Back in Canada, I opened my jewellery studio/gallery in Montreal in 1986. Later on, I taught jewellery for 10 years in Montreal and Nunavut.

From 1983 to 1999, I have mostly been making jewellery, until I decided it was time to go back to fine arts. Though I still keep my hand at jewellery and furniture design, my primary activity is now in visual arts. My artwork brings together my skills in sculpture, set and costume design, textile, jewellery, and photography. Since 1984, both my jewellery and my visual art work have been shown in North America and Europe in over 70 group shows and 15 solo exhibitions.

My musical adventure started with cello playing in the late ’80s, and continued with singing, which I started in the late ’90s. Through my traveling and encounters, I’ve learned many different ways of using my voice, starting from choir blending to overtones and Inuit thoat singing, Georgian harmonies and singing in various exotic languages, vintage pop, to bel canto. The results are Oufti (an a capella girl trio with Samantha Hirst and Laurel MacDonald) and Megobrebi (a twelve-women a capella ensemble), both groups based in Toronto.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Peter_Feldmann

Installation, Performance, and Conceptual artist Dan Graham (American, b.1942) is best known for his pioneering advances in Video Art as well as his highly-conceptual installations, which facilitate specific interactions between viewers. Born in Urbana, Illinois, he moved to New Jersey as a young man and in 1962 opened the John Daniels Gallery in New York, his first official foray into the art world. There he showed the work of Conceptual and Minimalist artists, such as Sol LeWitt (American, 1928–2007) and Donald Judd (American, 1928–1994), and began creating works himself during this time, influenced by similar reductive aesthetics. Beginning in the late 1960s, he worked with photography, documenting houses in both urban and suburban areas, which he later published in a magazine format, accompanied by texts in his Homes for America series. In the 1970s, he was a leading proponent of Performance and Video Art, before turning to an installation format to create architectural sites provoking interactions between viewers and public spaces. He often also used video, mirrors, and other materials in innovative ways to explore the relationship formed between the audience and the artwork. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany, the Museu Serralves in Portugal, and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. He has also exhibited his work in several Documenta exhibitions in Kassel. In addition to his work as an artist, Graham is also an acclaimed cultural critic and theorist, and has published several significant books over the past three decades. He currently lives and works in New York City.

General Idea was a collective of three Canadian artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, who were active from 1967 to 1994. As pioneers of early conceptual and media-based art, their collaboration became a model for artist-initiated activities and continues to be a prominent influence on subsequent generations of artists. Initially working in Toronto, from 1968 through 1993 they divided their time between Toronto and New York before returning to Toronto for the last few months of their time together.

General Idea’s work inhabited and subverted forms of popular and media culture, including beauty pageants, boutiques, television talk shows, trade fair pavilions and mass media. Their work was often presented in unconventional media forms such as postcards, prints, posters, wallpaper, balloons, crests and pins. From 1987 through 1994 their work addressed the AIDS crisis, with work that included some 75 temporary public art projects. Their major installation, One Year of AZT/One Day of AZT, was featured as a project at the Museum of Modern Art and now resides in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. In 2006 the three giant inflatable pills from their 1991 work PLA©EBO were displayed during Toronto’s Nuit blanche.

After publishing FILE magazine for two years and amassing a large collection of artists books and multiples, General Idea founded Art Metropole in 1974, a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art in multiple format: artists books, multiples, video, audio and electronic media.
Retrospectives of General Idea’s work continue to tour Europe and North America. General Idea Editions: 1967-1995 was featured at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain from 30 January – 1 April 2007, and included a recreation of the installations Magic Bullet and Magic Carpet, as well as the major installation Fin de Siècle. Before that Editions was exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Munich Kunstverein, Kunstwerke (Berlin), and the Kunsthalle in Zurich, Switzerland. General Idea has been featured in the Paris, Sydney, São Paulo and Venice Biennales, as well as at Documenta 10 in Kassel, Germany.

Both Partz and Zontal died of AIDS in 1994. Bronson continues to work and exhibit as an independent artist, and was the director of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York between 2006 and 2011. The General Idea Archive now resides at the Library of the National Gallery of Canada.

Born in 1960 in Winnipeg. Lives and works in Toronto. Micah Lexier is a Toronto-based multimedia artist whose many-tiered practice includes sculpture, installation, photography and text-based work, as well as curation. Lexier graduated with an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984. His practice is consonant with the sensibility of that institution, revolving largely around conceptual acts of enumeration and demarcation. A well-known photographic work of Lexier’s, David: Then and Now (2005), reworks his Portrait of David (2004), spanning 10 years, and showing the effects of aging on 75 men named David, each a different age from one to 75. Lexier has had more than 100 solo exhibitions, participated in some 200 group exhibitions and produced numerous permanent public commissions. Recent publications include Call Ampersand Response, a collaborative bookwork made with Michael Dumontier, which was co-published by Artexte and Nieves in 2012, and I’m Thinking of A Number, a 30-year survey of Lexier’s ephemera, published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2010.

American sculptor, installation artist and musician. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in the late 1970s, and whilst on an exchange programme to New York he began presenting performances involving experimental music. His early visual work played on his interest in music: his Record without a Cover, released in 1985 by Recycled Records in New York, was a recording of his music distributed to record shops in the normal manner but bearing the instructions that it should not be placed in any kind of sleeve or cover. The Beatles (1989; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 24) destroys the possibility of sound altogether, consisting as it does of a pillow crocheted from cassette tape of the entire Beatles back catalogue. The relationship between sound and non-sound, and between objects brought together in unexpected combinations, are central concerns in Marclay’s work. Black and White (1992; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 43) is one in a series of composite images made by sewing LP covers together to make hybrid figures, echoing the scratching and sampling of his earlier sound work. In the installation Echo and Narcissus (1992; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.), 14000 CDs cover the gallery floor so that the viewer walks over them, their purpose as music recordings warped into a shiny surface, with the only sound being the viewers’ footsteps. Marclay’s practice purposefully straddles both gallery-based visual art and pop music, exploring ways of disrupting our perceptions of sound and identity using techniques of collage, scratching, misplacement and surprise.

Born in California to Canadian parents in 1955, Daniel Olson completed degrees in mathematics and architecture before obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1986 from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Halifax) and a Master of Fine Arts in 1995 from York University (Toronto). Olson’s work, which includes sculpture, multiples, installation, photography, performance, audio, video and artist’s books, has been exhibited widely, including shows at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec), Galerie Optica (Montreal), and the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris). Olson has published numerous artist’s books and multiples, most of which have been available at Art Metropole in Toronto, where he is also represented by Birch Libralato. Since 2001 Olson has been living and working in Montreal. Solo exhibitions include Twenty Minutes’ Sleep, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2005); Other Conditions, Modern Fuel (Kingston, 2005); Unknown Seventies Artists, Galerie TPW (Toronto, 2005); and I’m Not There (1955), Goethe Institute (Dublin, 2004). Olson has exhibited in group exhibitions such as Aural Cultures, Walter Philips Gallery (Banff, Alberta, 2005); Frottements: Objets et surfaces sonores, Musee national des beaux arts de Quebec, (Quebec, 2004); In Light (video projections by eight artists), Art Gallery of Ontario, (Toronto, 2004); and Promise, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver,2001).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (1982, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Basel, Sydney, Toronto, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg. His work has been featured and reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Interview, SLEEK, Capricious, V, HUNTER, Paper, and BUTT, among other publications. Awards include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency (2009-2010) and Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2010), and Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2010-2011). His most recent artist publication, STUDIO WORK, was published in 2012 and the related body of work has been exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY, Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, and Artspeak, Vancouver.

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and lives and works in upstate New York. Mining images from mass media, advertising and entertainment since the late seventies, Prince has redefined the concepts of authorship, ownership, and aura. Applying his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the making of art, he evolved a unique signature filled with echoes of other signatures yet that is unquestionably his own. An avid collector and perceptive chronicler of American subcultures and vernaculars and their role in the construction of American identity, he has probed the depths of racism, sexism, and psychosis in mainstream humor; the mythical status of cowboys, bikers, customized cars, and celebrities; and most recently, the push-pull allure of pulp fiction and soft porn, producing such unlikely icons as the highly coveted Nurse paintings.

Daryl Vocat , born in Regina, Saskatchewan, is a visual artist living and working in Toronto. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, and his Master of Fine Arts degree at York University in Toronto. His main focus is printmaking, specifically screen printing. He works out of Toronto’s Open Studio.

He has had solo exhibitions at Toronto’s Thrush Holmes Empire, Open Studio, and York Quay Gallery. He has also had solo exhibitions at SNAP gallery and Latitude 53 in Edmonton, Eastern Edge Gallery in St John’s, James K. Bartleman Art Gallery in Elliot Lake, The Wilfred Laurier Gallery in Waterloo, and Malaspina Printmakers Gallery in Vancouver. He has participated in several group exhibitions both in Canada and beyond, including an internationally touring exhibition titled Further, Artists From Printmaking at the Edge. Most recently he had work in the New Prints exhibition at the International Print Center New York.

His work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in NYC, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery permanent collection in British Columbia, The Saskatchewan Arts Board permanent collection, and the City of Toronto Fine Art collection. His artwork has been published in YYZine from YYZ Gallery in Toronto, Briarpatch magazine from Regina, and Printmaking at the Edge by Richard Noyce, published in Great Britain.

Lawrence Weiner has exhibited at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2013), the Jewish Museum, New York (2012), the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2000), the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1995), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1990), and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1990). An important traveling retrospective of his work was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007-2008). He has participated in Documenta V (1972), VI (1977), VII (1982), and XIII (2012) the Venice Biennale (2013, 2003, 1984, and 1972) as well as the Biennale Sao Paolo in 2006. Among his many honors are the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1976 and 1983), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), Wolfgang Hahn Prize (1995), and a Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999). In 2013 he was awarded the Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Born in Poland, part French, tall, white, ugly and raised in the jungle… Tonik’s art investigates the pneumatic romance between everything and nothing at all. His work is represented by Art Metropole, Toronto and Printed Matter, New York. Tonik is looking forward to going back to Europe in the autumn of 2007.