Art Metropole

John Abrams holds an MFA from York University and is an Associate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto. He carries out an active practice as a painter, sculpture and filmmaker.

A founding and current member of Loop Gallery in Toronto, he shows there on a regular bases; also an active A Space Gallery member, having previously served on the artist run centre Board of Directors two terms.

Abrams works with the University of Toronto Art Centre to produce documentary videos of artist and curator talks, panels and visiting professors lectures that address the University of Toronto’s fourteen thousand artworks. Responsible for producing, shooting and editing 25-30 documentaries over last four years, this work may be viewed at: http://www.utac.utoronto.ca/watch.

Represented by Boltax Gallery, New York, Abrams’ work may be found in many national and international collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, the McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, the McDonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph, the Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery, Oshawa, the University of Toronto Art Centre and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto and the O’Hare Airport Chicago.

Barbara Astman, RCA, is one of Canada’s most highly acclaimed artists whose work has received national and international recognition. Since the 1970s she has explored a wide range of photographic and mixed media. Her work is represented in many museum, corporate, and private collections, in Canada, United States, and Europe.

Astman has degrees from the Rochester Institute of Technology, School for American Craftsmen, and Ontario College of Art.

Active in the Toronto arts community, Astman has sat on numerous boards and advisory committees. Currently, she is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Art Gallery of Ontario and works as a Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art & Design.) In 2011 she was appointed to the Canadian Curatorial Committee at the AGO. In 1995 the Art Gallery of Hamilton organized a major touring retrospective exhibition, Barbara Astman – Personal/Persona – A 20 Year Survey, curated by Liz Wylie. She is represented by the Corkin Gallery, Toronto.

Astman has been commissioned for public art projects beginning in the mid eighties. In 1987 she completed a floor installation for the Calgary Winter Olympics. In 2005 she completed a public art installation for the new Canadian Embassy in Berlin, Germany. Most recently she completed a public art project in Toronto, the Murano on Bay, comprised of 217 windows with photo-based imagery.

In 2008 Astman and AGO Assistant Curator Georgiana Uhlyarik collaborated on a curatorial project for the Transformation AGO Exhibition, dealing with Joyce Wieland and early feminist practice. Astman’s photo-based work was included in the AGO exhibition titled: Beautiful Fiction, fall 2009. In May 2011, her recent installation, dancing with che: enter through the gift shop, opened at the Kelowna Art Galley. Her most recent solo exhibition, Daily Collage, opened at the Corkin Gallery in the fall of 2011.

Barbara Balfour is an interdisciplinary and print media artist and curator who has exhibited her work and lectured across Canada and in the USA, UK and France. She has been a member of two artist collectives, the Toronto-based Spontaneous Combustion, and Venus Fly Trap based in Montreal. Her recent solo exhibitions include Soft Spots (Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge), Designs for the Anti-Bubble (The Other Gallery, Banff), Selfish (The Koffler Gallery, Toronto) and Living & Dying (YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto – reviewed in Art in America). In the field of professional printing, she has worked for such artists as Leon Golub, Robert Indiana, Komar and Melamid, and David Rabinowitch.

In addition to print installation, artist’s books, and multiples, Professor Balfour has incorporated writing, video, and digital imaging into her art. Her art practice has been an inquiry into the representation of women within medical discourse and an examination of the relationship between soma and psyche. In her current research, she is considering notions of selfishness, manifestations of printing error, and instances of failure.

Professor Balfour joined the faculty in the Department of Visual Arts at York University in 1999.

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.

Blue Republic is a critically acclaimed, multi-disciplinary collaboration between artists Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski. Blue Republic has been involved in presentations, exhibitions and projects in Canada and internationally, including at the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen; CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Galleria D’Arte Moderna in Bologna (Officina America); Galerie Julio Gonzales, Paris; Cultural Services Co-op in Siem Riep, Cambodia; Curitiba, Brazil; Tokyo, Japan; as well as Galerie René Blouin, Oakville Galleries, Art Gallery of Sudbury, MacLaren Art Centre, and Doris McCarthy Gallery.

AA Bronson, born Michael Tims, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1946 -.

Krista Buecking (born 1982) is a Canadian visual artist.

Krista Buecking was born in Brampton, Ontario in 1982, and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. From 2002 to 2007, she attended Guelph University in Guelph, Ontario, and in 2012 she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts.

Krista Buecking’s work consists of large-scale sculptures, drawings and installations that explore often sentiments of disappointment, disintegration and renewal. We Thing, her most recent solo exhibition, consisted of architectural, sculptural, plant and video components that attempted to illustrate the intangible, abstract system of neoliberalism. As Ellyn Walker writes in Magenta Magazine, “We Thing [..] reiterates our identity as that of social construct, rooted in the premise of a lifestyle promised, and formerly believed unattainable” Some of Buecking’s earlier work consists of drawings of lyrics from classic American pop songs by artists such as Patsy Cline and Elvis Presley, such as That’s when your heartaches begin and Are You Lonesome Tonight?­ As Rosemary Heather writes in a 2010 article in Canadian Art, “ Within American pop songs Buecking has located deeper truths about the culture that produced them. Endless change and a taste for the ephemeral have produced the conditions for a rootless population.” In her series of drawings from 2007-2008 entitled Proposal for Ruins, Buecking examined various states of disintegration and renewal in a set of modernist buildings that she depicts in ruin. In this series, Buecking selected historical buildings with back stories connected the fall-outs from ideological and political impulses of Modernism, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Adalberto Libera’s Casa Malaparte.

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.

Considered multi-disciplinary, Butler’s practice if focused around community, collaboration and artist-run activity. Butler’s projects include: The Collage Party – touring studio made open to the public; Directing The Other Gallery – a nomadic commercial gallery; leading Reverse Pedagogy – an experimental residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts; and serving as the inaugural artist-in-residence at The Art Gallery of Ontario. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; White Columns, New York City; Creative Growth Art Centre, Oakland; La Maison Rouge, Paris; and is represented by Jessica Bradley Art and Projects, Toronto. Currently, Butler is pursuing his MFA at Concordia University, Montreal. He has contributed writings to the book Decentre: Concerning Artist-run Culture and to the magazines BorderCrossings and Canadian Art.

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.

Ian Carr-Harris has been creating and exhibiting his art for over 30 years, including sculptures, site-specific installations and photography and more recently, illuminated books.

He began his intellectual life studying history and library science; his artistic work first emerged in the 1970’s with an exhibition at A Space, then Canada’s pioneer artist-run centre. Since that time, he has continued to exhibit his work in Canada and internationally. Carr-Harris represented Canada at the 1984 Venice Biennale, at Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987, and at the Sydney Biennale in 1990. He has paralleled his outstanding artistic achievements with a commitment to guiding new generations of artists; since 1975, he has taught sculpture and installation at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Carr-Harris has written extensively on the work of other artists, has served on the boards of art galleries and artist-run centres and has contributed to public policy in the arts as a member of the Metro Toronto Public Art Advisory Commission. He is the winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Rob Clarke was born in 1964 in Edmonton (Canada). At the age of 23, he moved to the United States where he graduated in 1991 from Rutgers University (New Jersey). He lives today in the Queens (New York USA). For a long time, Rob Clarke has been working as an book illustrator. His working for children’s literature did not prevent him from developing aside a completely different part of his work: gay erotic art. He started becoming famous by being published in gay magazines such as Honcho and Unzipped and exhibiting in galleries throughout the United States. Year after year, Rob Clarke has invented a whole new universe among gay artists

Miles Collyer (born, 1983 in Toronto) is a visual artist whose practice is motivated by photo-based sources and issues relating to cultural identity. He studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design where he was the recipient of several academic scholarships and awards before graduating with a BFA in photography in 2006. After completing his undergraduate studies Collyer has gone on to receive further grants and awards for his work, most notably a Gold medal in 2008 from the Canadian National Magazine Awards in the category of Best Art Direction for a Single Magazine Article. His work has been widely published and exhibited across Canada, the United States, Australia, Switzerland, Germany and several curated exhibits online.

Tom Dean’s work eludes categories. He has made paintings, videos and multiples, but is best known for his sculpture. His art plays upon the tensions between ordinary and mythical, with works varying in scale from miniature to monumental, their subject matter ranging from familiar, everyday objects to classical icons. His epic subjects allude to the dream world of the psyche and matters of the soul, but always reside in the intensely material world of desire and the body.

Dean was recognized in 1999 with the honour of being chosen as the Canadian representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale. A catalogue accompanied Dean’s Venice Biennale exhibition.

Tom Dean was born in Markdale, Ontario (1947) and settled in Montreal in the late 1960s, where he studied visual art at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) and became a well-known figure in the city’s alternative scene. He was a founding member of Véhicule Art Inc (and Véhicule Press), a renowned centre of avant-garde activity at the time. From 1972 to 1974 Dean published Beaux Arts magazine with fellow artist Stephen Lack. Over the next decade he produced works in several media, including texts, video, sculpture and prints, and gained a reputation for his elaborate multidisciplinary performances.

In 1976 Tom Dean moved to Toronto and shortly thereafter began his monumental sculpture project, The Floating Staircase (1978-81), whose remains were resurrected in an installation at Mercer Union, Toronto (1983). The various sections of Dean’s extended serial sculpture Excerpts from a Description of the Universe (1984-88) were widely exhibited through the latter half of the 1980s, including in Aurora Borealis at the Centre international d’art contemporain, Montréal (1985) and in a solo exhibition at the 49th Parallel Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art, New York (1985). In 1988 his work was included in the group exhibition All That Matters, which travelled across the country. From 1986 to 1989 Dean lived in New York, participating in exhibitions there as well as in Canada, including in 1990 an exhibition of his drawings and sculptures at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston (with catalogue).

Throughout the 1990s his artworks have been presented in several important group and solo exhibitions in Canada and Europe. A selection of his works from the early 1980s to the present were exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (Tom Dean: Selected Works Past and Present, 1999).

He has been collected by such major institutions as the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée des beaux arts de Montréal.

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.

Patrick DeCoste is an award-winning Toronto-based visual artist who studied fine arts at Mount Allison University. He has exhibited extensively in Toronto, as well as New York City and beyond. The Globe and Mail calls him ‘a young old master’ and Los Angeles writer Chris Kraus in C-Magazine describes his painting as ‘heroic and musty, strange and disturbing’. He was awarded a Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2011. He is currently an MFA student at OCADU (Ontario College of Art and Design University) in Toronto.

Judith Doyle, an artist and filmmaker, is Associate Professor and Chair of Integrated Media at OCADU in Toronto. She directs the Social Media and Collaboration Lab – SMAClab – established in 2012. In 1978, Doyle co-founded Worldpool, an international artists’ network using proto-Internet collaboration technologies including telefacsimile. Her film subjects include an itinerate Nicaraguan theatre troupe; an account of traumatic spinal injury; and a portrait of her father’s end of life, alongside urban foxes in his backyard. Screenings include Mannheim, TIFF and Brooklyn International Film Festival. In new media, Doyle modeled her family home as architecture for memory and forgetting. While a Canwest Global Fellow at the Banff New Media Institute (2005) Doyle made Foxscape in the Unreal game engine; her site-specific installation created for a computer lab was presented in Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2007 in the TestBed program curated by David McIntosh. Phantom House (2010) exists in SecondLife with HD video versions. GestureCloud – her collaboration with Beijing artist Fei Jun – focuses on gesture as a surplus value of labour. GestureCloud has documented gesture in the factory, and in the SMAClab studio using Kinect-based 3D depth cameras. GestureCloud is developing gesture-based artistic tools and methods of networking installations between Canada and China. During her sabbatical Artist Residency at Memory Link, Baycrest, Doyle collaborated with Robin Len, Emad Dabiri and Kang-Il Kim on compositing and animation that represents the experience of amnesia and memory loss. This appears on crowd-sourced TVs in the installation ‘Pathfinding’.

Born in 1973, Stephen Ellwood lives and works in New York.

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.

Gary Evans was born in Weston Super Mare, England and resides in Alliston, Ontario. He has been exhibiting work professionally in Toronto since 1995, his work, which is both imaginative and descriptive of actual places challenges traditional notions of perception and the experience of the landscape. He had a touring exhibition of his work, Seeing Things: The Paintings of Gary Evans visit numerous regional gllaeries across Canada between 2000-2002 as well as a survey of more recent work titled Station, at The Art Gallery Of Windsor in 2008. His next exhibition, titled spce invdrs was at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in September 2011.

Born in London, Ontario in 1949, Robert Fones had his first solo exhibition in that city at 20/20 Gallery in 1969 and was also a founding member of Forest City Gallery in London. Since 1976 he has lived and worked in Toronto where he has exhibited regularly. He is represented by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto. He has also shown work at other artists- run centers, commercial galleries and public institutions. A ten-year survey exhibition of his work was organized by The Power Plant in 1989. Fones has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally in the United States and Germany. His work is in The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario and other public and corporate collections.

Robert Fones has worked in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, woodblock printmaking and photography. In his work he has investigated the transition from manual to industrial production; disclosed hidden processes of geological and cultural change; and exploited the innate ambiguities of photographic and painted pictorial space. The latter theme is exemplified by Head Paintings, one of many artists books that Fones has published with Coach House Press and Art Metropole. The book is typeset in Fones-Caslon, a typeface he designed specifically for this publication. A number of his works use type in combination with photographs or pictorial representations.

Robert Fones is an active participant in the Toronto art community. He has served on the board of The Art Gallery of Ontario, C Magazine Foundation and the Acquisitions Committee of the Design Exchange. In 1990 he curated an exhibition for The Power Plant on the work of Toronto furniture designer, Russell Spanner. In 2011, he curated Cutout: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965–1968 for Museum London.

Robert Fones has taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and in the Art and Art History Program at Sheridan College. He has also published numerous reviews and articles in Vanguard, C Magazine, Parachute and other publications.

Garnet throughout his career has been a participant in both the Canadian and the international cultural world. From the very beginning, his photographic works were included in exhibitions in the United States and then Europe. He has maintained an international presence throughout his career. Still as a young artist, his work was presented at La Memelle in San Francisco 1978. A participant at the Venice Biennale in 1985. Garnet’s 1997 work, ­_NO­_ was included in the exhibition Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2000) and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2001). In 1997, the National Gallery (CMCP) hosted his mid career survey entitled: the Fallen Body. Other new photographic works, Fissure (1997), Fracture (1999), and Lament (2000), among them have recently been the subject of exhibitions in the Netherlands, at the Noorderlicht Photofestival, Groningen (2001). Garnet has had major surveys of his photographs, at the Amsterdams Centrum voor Fotografie (2002) and Dust at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto (2002).

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.

Ron Gillespie was born in 1944 at New Westminster, BC. His earliest training in art took place in 1962-64 at H.S.C. Prince of Wales College, Nairobi, East Africa. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1975 and established a signifant performance art practice during the 1970’s. By the early 1980s he had moved into drawing while retaining a strongly performative element in the compositions. Philosophy, geometry and the anti- modern figure prominently in the work with influences including Artaud, Darwin, Hegel and Spinoza.

Sadko studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, Bosnia, earned his MFA at the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia (1984) and arrived in Canada in 1993. Since his arrival from Bosnia, Sadko has participated in over sixty exhibitions in public galleries and artist-run centres across Canada. He is the recipient of visual arts grants from Toronto Art Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Sadko continues to explore identity, and its cultural and social implications, with an extensive portraiture-based body of work using mixed media and collage, and an array of references to popular culture.

Anitra Hamilton is a Toronto-born artist. Her work has been shown here, stateside and abroad. Her solo show The Future Has Been Decided is on view at Georgia Scherman Projects until April 23. Her first animation, Jump! (a collaboration with Ken Ogawa), is on view at the Thessaloniki Centre of Contemporary Art. She will be participating in 9-5 at the Art Gallery of Ontario at the end of April.

Joel Herman is a visual artist who completed his BFA at the University of Victoria in 2004 and his MFA at the University of Guelph in 2008. His work has been exhibited in Canada at Birch Libralato, Toronto (2007), Gallery 44, Toronto (2006), Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver (2005), Open Space, Victoria (2004), and The Ministry of Casual Living, Victoria (2004).

Between 2002 and 2005, Joel was a volunteer at CFUV community radio in Victoria, BC, where he hosted a radio program dedicated to experimental and improvised music. He has also been active as an improviser, performing percussion in a variety of ensembles in Victoria, Vancouver, and Toronto.

Marla Hlady is a celebrated sound artist and kinetic sculptor. Her pieces deal with the nature of sound, often materializing it for viewers and reorienting their connection to everyday auditory experiences. Hlady received a BFA from the University of Victoria and an MFA from York University. She began showing in the early 1990s, eventually being included in several national and international group shows, such as 1996′s “Blink” at Toronto’s Power Plant. (In 2001, the same gallery hosted a solo show of her work.) Hlady’s practice developed in scope and ambition through the 2000s; 2008′s Playing Piano was a player piano from the 1920s intricately modified with contemporary machinery. In 2012, Hlady did a number of site-specific projects for her solo show at Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, and for a residency in Norway. Hlady was nominated for the 2002 Sobey Art Award and her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. Hlady lives and works in Toronto.

Instant Coffee is a service oriented artist collective now based in Toronto and Vancouver. The domain name Instant Coffee was registered in May of 2000. Instant Coffee’s motive for initiating “services” came from our desire to place relational activities, more directly communication, at the core of our practice. Ultimately, we believe that communication is the primary function of artistic production, but what is meant by communication or the building of relations is continually under negotiation. Together we have developed a practice that culminates in bringing together large numbers of artists, designers, musicians and other cultural producers under loosely themed events. We offer networking services that promote local, national and international activities and publish a monthly on-line magazine, Instant Coffee Saturday Edition. In conjunction with our events, we also publish bookworks, posters and other multiples. Instant Coffee’s most consistent members are Jinhan Ko, Jenifer Papararo, Kate Monro, Cecilia Berkovic, Jon Sasaki, Emily Hogg and Kelly Lycan.

Jay Isaac (b.1975, St John, NB,) studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC (1993-1997) and at the Cardiff Institute of Art and Design, Cardiff, Wales (1996). His work has been widely exhibited, with notable exhibitions at Galleria d’art moderna di Bologna, Bologna; MOCA Toronto; Mercer Union, Toronto; Galerie Kunstbuero, Vienna; The Power Plant, Toronto; White Columns, New York; Cue Art Foundation, New York; Agnes Etherington Art Center, Kingston, ON; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; The AGO, Toronto; CAG, Vancouver; Night Gallery, LA; Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto/Vancouver; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, NB; soon.tw, Montreal; David Risley Gallery Copenhagen; McIntosh Gallery, London, ON; Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto. He was co-founder and publisher of Hunter and Cook Magazine (2009-2011) and founded and ran the @nationalgalleryofcanada Instagram account (2015-2016). He has been the recipient of numerous awards including, most recently, Canada Council project grants (2017 and 2018) an Ontario Arts Council grant (2018), and the Chalmers Art Fellowship funded by the Ontario Arts Council (2019). Isaac’s work can be found in numerous public and corporate collections in Canada. Isaac lives and works in Toronto, Canada and is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

(from Paul Petro Contemporary Art)

My work as an artist, curator and occasional writer has long been concerned with the exploration of two ultimately related pathways – photography’s mediating role in our postmodern understanding of the past and in the nature of our urban space. These explorations have resulted in the presentation of my work in exhibitions across Canada and Europe at such institutions as the Koffler Gallery, Toronto; Dazibao, Montreal; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England; and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. My curatorial projects considering the relationship between photography, archives and the public museum have been presented at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg; Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette; Presentation House, Vancouver; the Photographer’s Gallery, London, England; and the Bildmuseet, UmeÃ¥, Sweden. My reviews and commentary on photography have appeared in Blackflash; Canadian Art; C magazine; the American Journal of Visual Resources and, forthcoming, in Alphabet City.

Luis Jacob is a Peruvian-born Toronto-based artist and curator whose work destabilizes conventions of viewing and invites a collision of meanings. He studied semiotics and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Since his participation in documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, he has achieved an international reputation with exhibitions at venues such as: Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2019; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2019; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2018; Museion Bolzano, 2017; La Biennale de Montréal, 2016; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York City, 2015; Taipei Biennial, 2012; Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2011; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 2010; Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2008; and Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 2008.

Garry Neill Kennedy is a senior Canadian artist. In addition to an active career as an artist, Kennedy taught studio art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University) for over forty years where he also served as president for 23 years (1967 – 1990). He was visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) and Ēcole des Beaux Arts, Paris (ENSB-A). His most recent solo museum exhibitions were held at The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Owens Art Gallery and Portikus (#86, Frankfurt am Main). In 2003 he was a recipient of the Order of Canada and in 2004, the Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts. In 2011 he received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from NSCAD University.

Kennedy recently had solo shows in Toronto at Diaz Contemporary, 2012 and in Vancouver, BC at Or Gallery in 2013 and The Apartment in 2014. He has also recently completed two books — one for MIT Press, The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968 -1978 and a second, a catalogue raisonne of his printed matter published by the Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, both in 2012. Kennedy team teaches part-time with his wife, Cathy Busby at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC where they make their home.

Bruce LaBruce is a Toronto based filmmaker, writer, director, photographer, and artist. He began his career in the mid eighties making a series of short experimental super 8 films and co-editing a punk fanzine called J.D.s, which begat the queercore movement. He has directed and starred in three feature length movies, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Super 8 1/2 (1994), and Hustler White (1996). More recently he has directed two art/porn features, Skin Flick(2000)(hardcore version: Skin Gang) and The Raspberry Reich (2004)(hardcore version: The Revolution Is My Boyfriend), and the independent feature Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008). After premiering at Sundance and Berlin, “The Raspberry Reich” took off on the international film festival circuit, playing at over 150 festivals, including the Istanbul, Guadalajara, and Rio de Janeiro International Film Festivals. He was also honoured with retrospectives at the end of ’05 at the Madrid and Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals. Otto; or, Up with Dead People also debuted at Sundance and Berlin and played at over 150 film festivals, culminating in a screening at MoMA in New York City in November of 2008. His new film, L.A. Zombie, starring French star Francois Sagat, premiered in competition at the Locarno International Film Festival in August, 2010. It will have it’s French premier at the L’Etrange Film Festival in Paris and its North American premier at the Toronto International Film Festival in Septemer. 2010. The hardcore version, L.A. Zombie Hardcore, will be released at Halloween, 2010.

LaBruce has written a premature memoir entitled The Reluctant Pornographer, from Gutter Press. The Plug-In Gallery in Winnipeg, Canada published a book on LaBruce’s work, Ride Queer Ride, in 1998. In the past several years, LaBruce has written and directed three theatrical productions. Cheap Blacky (2007) and The Bad Breast; or, The Strange Case of Theda Lange (2009) were both produced at the Hau 2 and featured Susanne Sachsse and Vaginal Davis. Macho Family Romance (2009), commissioned by Theater Neumarkt in Zurich, also featured Ms. Sachsse and Ms. Davis. LaBruce was a contributing editor and frequent writer and photographer for Index magazine, and he has also been a regular contributor to Eye and Exclaim magazines, Dutch, Vice, the National Post, Nerve.com. and Black Book. He was also formerly a frequent photographer for the US porn mags Honcho and Inches, and has recently contributed to Butt, Kink, Jack, Currency, Kaiserin, and Slurp. As a fashion photographer he has contributed stories to such magazines as Dazed and Confused, Bon, Tank, Tetu, Fake, Attitude, Blend, Tokion, Purple Fashion, and the National Post.

LaBruce had his first solo show of photographs presented by the Alleged Gallery in New York in December 1999. He has had subsequent solo exhibits of his photographs at the Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, MC MAGMA in Milano, Italy, Bailey Fine Arts Gallery in Toronto, Peres Projects in San Francisco, and at John Connelly Presents in New York. His show Heterosexuality Is the Opiate of the Masses opened on July 16th/05 at Peres Projects in Los Angeles. In July/06 he mounted Polaroid Rage: A Survey of Polaroids, 2000-2006 at Gallery 1313 in Toronto. He has also participated in numerous group shows. In October of 2006 he was the featured artist at the Barcelona International Erotic Festival. His latest solo shows include Untitled Hardcore Zombie Project, which opened at Peres Projects in Culver City, LA, on May 23rd, 2009, and L.A. Zombie: The Movie That Would Not Die, which premiered at Peres Projects Berlin on January 30th, 2010. LaBruce has also made a number of popular music videos in Canada, two of which won him MuchMusic video awards.

Wanda Koop is one of Canada’s most distinguished and inventive artists. Her career spans three decades and includes over 50 solo exhibitions. From the very beginning of her career, Koop garnered critical acclamation for her work. Starting in the 1980s, she charted new directions for painting, pushing the boundaries of presentation and display with her all-encompassing installations. Over the last decade she has become recognized for incorporating poetic video work into her painting environments.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1951, the daughter of Russian Mennonite immigrants, Koop moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba as a young child and has called this remarkable city home ever since. While still a university student, Koop’s work was included in an exhibition in 1972 at The Winnipeg Art Gallery. She graduated in 1973 from the Lemoine Fitzgerald School of Art, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. Over the course of her career, she has been the recipient of numerous national and international awards in recognition of her achievements as an artist, such as the Canada Council “A” Grant, the Paris Studio, the Japan Fund Award, and the Manitoba Arts Council “A” Grant. In 2002 she was honoured with the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal and received her Doctors of Letters from the University of Winnipeg. She was granted her second honourary doctorate from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver in 2007. Her alma mater, the University of Manitoba, has recently awarded Koop with a Doctor of Law at Spring Convocation 2009. The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts elected her as a member in 2005. Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, appointed Wanda Koop a member of the Order of Canada in 2006. This award was established in 1967 to recognize outstanding achievement and service in various fields of human endeavour. It is Canada’s highest honour of lifetime achievement.

Koop travels extensively as part of her working process and has exhibited across Canada and the USA, as well as in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Japan, India, China, and Italy (in conjunction with the 2001 Venice Biennale). Koop’s creative output has been consistently featured in national art publications such as Canadian Art and Border Crossings. In 1997, The National Film Board of Canada and Buffalo Gal Pictures produced a documentary on her life and work.

Her work is included in numerous private collections and is represented in several prestigious museum collections such as The National Gallery of Canada. The Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Canada are currently working in partnership on an exhibition of Wanda Koop’s oeuvre that will tour across Canada and internationally from 2010 on. This exhibition will focus on Koop’s practice from almost three decades, delineated by distinct suites yet tied to an overarching critique of how modes of technology impact nature.

Tenacious and exceedingly generous, Koop is also well known for her community work. In 1993 she co-created the Rotterdam Apartment Cooperative to help Canadian artists live and work in the Netherlands, with additional residences in Canada for Dutch artists. An integral member of the local arts community, Koop has made a measurable impact in Winnipeg. In 1998 she founded Art City as a storefront art centre. The goal of Art City is to bring together contemporary visual artists and inner-city youth to explore the creative process. Art City is not just about art, it is about belonging, it is about creating opportunities, developing life skills, enhancing self-esteem and self-respect within a disadvantaged community.

Yvonne Lammerich is an artist currently based in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since the 1980’s, including the Museé du Quebec (1998) and the Quebec international Biennale (2000) and most recently at Diaz Contemporary (2008) and the Southern Art Gallery of Alberta (SAAG) (2008). In 1996 she was awarded the Maria Stafford Mid-Career Prize administered by the Canada Council. Her work is represented in private and public collections, and her public commissions include projects for Pierre Trudeau Airport and Place Ville Marie in Montréal, Concord Pacific’s Beatty Street Park in Vancouver, and currently a project with the TTC in Toronto.

Yvonne Lammerich graduated from the Ontario College of Art in painting, from Concordia University with a Masters of Art History and a PhD in Art History from the Université du Quebec à Montréal.

She has also written articles for books and catalogues, and on the work of other artists for journals and magazines, including Parachute, Canadian Art and Contemporary magazine (UK). She served on the board and was also president of Gallery Optica in Montréal.

Her upcoming exhibitions include the Nunnery in London UK in April and participation in “Empire of Dreams” at MOCCA in Toronto in June 2010 and It takes everyone to know no one at the Barnicke Gallery, Toronto in 2011.

Born and raised in Halifax, NS, JJ Lee received her BFA from the NSCAD in 1992. After living in Vancouver and exhibiting in Vancouver and across Canada, Lee pursued her MFA from York University, Toronto (1999). Lee has been featured in The Globe and Mail and ELLE Canada. She is the recipient of several awards, such as from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, RBC /Canadian Art Foundation’s New Canadian Painting Competition and the Asian Canadian Artists Fund for Visual Arts. She is represented in the Magenta Foundation’s Carte Blanche: Painting, a survey of contemporary Canadian painters. She currently lives and works in Toronto where she is an Assistant Professor at

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.

Kelly Mark has always had an intense preoccupation with the differing shades of pathos and humour found in everyday life. Hidden in the repetitive mundane tasks, routines and rituals of contemporary culture, she finds startling moments of poetic individuation. This “imprint of the individual,” although subtle and frequently paradoxical, is something she repeatedly returns to. Through her ‘will to order’ and her (self-described) frequently inane sense of humour, her objective is the investigation, documentation and validation of these singular ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ moments of our lives.

Toronto-based Kelly Mark received her BFA in 1994 at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. She has exhibited widely across Canada, and internationally at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The Power Plant (Toronto), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Muse d’Art Contemporain (Montreal), Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Bass Museum (Miami), Ikon Gallery (UK), Lisson Gallery (UK), and the Physics Room (NZ). Mark represented Canada at the Liverpool Biennale in 2006 and the Sydney Biennale in 1998. She is a recipient of numerous Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council grants, as well as the KM Hunter Artist Award (2002), and Chalmers Art Fellowship (2002).

Pamila Matharu is an independent artist, cultural producer and educator. Her art practice is rooted in organizing projects, photography, film, video, and installation based work. Recent curatorial projects include: CUTMR with Christina Zeidler (2004-2008), TAAFI (Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, 2004, 2005) and Docu Lomo (Gallery TPW, 2002.) In 2005, she was short listed for the Untitled Art Awards Best Emerging Curator and won the Jury’s Choice Award in both 2004 and 2005 Untitled Art Awards for her organizational contribution to TAFFI.

Jonathan Monk was born in Leicester in 1969. Monk received a BFA from Leicester Polytechnic in 1988 and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 1991. In his work, Monk adopts the esthetics and practices of 1960s Conceptualism, but infuses the tradition with humor, levity, and autobiographical elements. In 1992 Monk sold paintings of low-budget travel advertisements for the price of the vacation package itself. In 1994 he mocked the artist’s gesture and persona by writing his name in urine on a beach in. And in 1995 and 1997 he took on the role of a driver awaiting various arriving passengers—Marcel Duchamp, Elizabeth Taylor, Jeff Koons, Kate Moss, Mom—in the Copenhagen airport terminal. While he was living in Los Angeles, Monk created None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip (1997–99) in reaction to Ed Ruscha’s famed photographic artist book. Monk produced two highly personal slide projections; In Search of Gregory Peck (1997) shows found photographs of the artist’s father as a tourist in Europe in the 1950s and The Gap Between My Mother and My Sister (1998) chronicles the trip between the homes of his mother and sister. Monk’s ongoing series Meetings (begun in 1999) proposes future dates and locations as hypothetical invitations to congregate, playing off of the text-based work of Lawrence Weiner and On Kawara. In 2002 Monk passed time as 50 nearly-identical photographs of the artist were developed in 50 different one-hour labs. For the ongoing project Day & Night (begun in 2002), Monk sends postcards to institutions rather than friends or family. For Keep Still (2002–04) the artist places white block letters atop the head of each figure in found group photographs spelling words or phrases like “today,” “a cube,” and “buzz. The slide show Big Ben (2003) projects postcards showing the London monument at the same time of day as the gallery. Monk mocked the display stipulations that often accompany contemporary art as well as the curatorial process in works like This painting should ideally be kept in storage (2004), This painting should ideally be hung near a Sol Lewitt (2004), and This painting should ideally be hung slightly too close to a Douglas Huebler (2005). Monk has created several works in neon; perhaps the best known are several from 2005 which display the hours that the hosting gallery is open to the public, a work that is turned on during opening hours and switched off at closing time. Also in 2005 Monk translated several of the neon innovations of his artistic predecessors into opaque painted aluminum in Corner Piece (for Bruce Nauman) and Corner Piece (for Dan Flavin). In 2009 Monk exhibited five stainless-steel sculptures that offer deflated versions of Jeff Koon’s signature balloon bunny.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow (1992 and 1994), Centre d’Art Contemporain in Neuchatel (1997), Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf (2003), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2005), Kunstverein Hannover (2006), Palais de Tokyo + Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris (2008), and Artpace in San Antonio (2009). His work has also been included in group exhibitions such as Taipei Biennial (2000), Berlin Biennale (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), Whitney Biennial (2006), Prague Biennale (2007), and Panama Bienniale (2008). Monk lives and works in Berlin.

Kelly McCray (co-founder of ArtBarrage) has an extensive background in contemporary art for over 20 years. As an artist and curator he has exhibited extensively in Canada and Europe. Projects include Cold City’s Mediatrics, the TCC’s In Tents City and most recently BANK on ART (www.bankonart.net). McCray has occupied leading roles in various arts organizations and was the co-director of a prominent commercial gallery in Toronto for ten years. He received numerous cultural grants in Canada and was the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Award in the United States in 2000.

Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to investigate contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. These articulations have resulted in a coven of lesbian feminist Sasquatch monsters, a room-sized Vagina Dentata, an army of super genius Holly Hobbies and a woodland utopic library complete with a wishing well of forbidden political knowledge.

Her works have exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US and Europe, including Tate Modern, the Textile Museum of Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, Walker Art Center, The British Film Institute, Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

A survey of Mitchell’s “hand made” animated film and video work recently toured festivals and performance spaces internationally with exhibitions in Dublin, London and Bologna. Until their retirement in 2004, Mitchell also performed actively with the fat performance troupe ‘Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’, which she co-founded in 1997.

Deep Lez, Mitchell’s ongoing aesthetic/political project advocating a strategic return to the herstories of radical and lesbian feminisms, has been the subject of dialogue within queer and trans communities in recent years. This ethic has caused a stir with activists and artists alike in a range of venues from living room potlucks and academic conferences to public galleries and museums.

Mitchell recently attended the Canada Council for the Arts International Studio (ISCP) in New York City. She is based in Toronto, where she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. She is represented by Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects and she runs FAG Feminist Art Gallery with Deirdre Logue.

William Grant “Will” Munro (February 11, 1975 – May 21, 2010) was a Toronto artist, club promoter, and restaurateur known for his work as a community builder among disparate Toronto groups. As a visual artist, he was known for fashioning artistic works out of underwear; as a club promoter, he was best known for his long-running Toronto queer club night, Vazaleen.

(from wikipedia)

Born in Australia, Munro grew up mostly in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, and moved to nearby Toronto to study at the Ontario College of Art, graduating in 2000. Influenced by such artists as General Idea and the queercore movement, he received critical attention for his work with men’s underwear, a medium he used eventually to create collages of colourful performers he admired such as Klaus Nomi and Leigh Bowery. He created silkscreen posters to advertise Vazaleen – his monthly nightclub party that was unusual for being a queer event where punk and other rock music was prominently played, and for being one of the first to exist beyond the confines of the gay ghetto. The party was known for attracting a diverse crowd, and at its peak brought in such performers as Nina Hagen; international “best-of” nightclub lists took notice.

Munro died of brain cancer in May 2010. Posthumous exhibits of his art work included a 2010 show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and in 2011 he was the first male artist to be featured in the feminist Montreal art gallery La Centrale.

Will Munro was born in Sydney, Australia in 1975. Later that year his family moved to Canada, just outside of Montreal, and then lived in Mississauga, Ontario from 1980 onwards.

Despite his involvement in nightclub events, Munro did not consume alcohol or recreational drugs. He was a vegan from a young age. For many years, he volunteered as a peer counsellor at the Toronto Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Youth Line, where an annual award was established in his honour after his death.

Munro was diagnosed with brain cancer and underwent surgery to remove a tumour in 2008. A second surgery was performed in October 2009. He entered into palliative care in April 2010, and died on May 21, 2010.

Munro moved from Mississauga to Toronto after high school, to attend the Ontario College of Art (OCA). From early on in his career, his signature medium was pastiche work with men’s underwear.The origins of this work date back to his Intro to Sculpture class at OCA, where his professor asked the students to “bring a special object to class that isn’t really functional, but is special to you.” Munro had long had an affinity for special underwear, ever since his mother had refused to buy him Underoos superhero underwear when he was a child; regarding white briefs, he said, “They were clinical and sterile. They weren’t very sexy. It just felt very repressed. I wanted Underoos so bad.” For the sculpture class, Munro decided to bring in a pair of underwear that he had stolen from a high school friend on whom he had a crush. He put the grey underwear on display in a Plexiglass cage, complete with air holes. In his subsequent work he decided to use white briefs as a medium “because they were so accessible.” The summer after his sculpture class, to keep himself busy on a road trip, he made a quilt out of white underwear. In 1997, his first show involving underwear was held in a gallery supported by his college. The show received publicity after conservative columnist Michael Coren, in the Toronto Sun and on the radio, criticized Munro and his show, in particular for having said that it involved “boys’ underwear” (although Munro had simply meant guys’ underwear). Coren asked the public to bring dirty diapers to the exhibit, but no one did.¹⁰ Munro went on to have many showings of his underwear art, mostly “rescued” from second-hand Goodwill clothing outlets, including at Who’s Emma, HEADspace, and Paul Petro Contemporary Art. Actor Selma Blair bought one of Munro’s underwear works when she was in town for the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival.

Munro’s influences included the work of General Idea, and the queercore movement. Speaking about the confluence of his music events and his art, Munro said in 2004, “This is where the music scene and gay underground come together. We’re at a time when all kinds of shifts are happening. The structure of artists’ galleries are changing. Magazines are changing. There’s more different kinds of artist activity that’s happening. All this is having an impact on my visual work. And my visual work is more and more going into performance.” Galleries exhibiting his work have included Art in General, in New York City, Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, and Toronto galleries Zsa Zsa, Mercer Union, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, and the Art Gallery of York University. Munro was named on the longlist of finalists for the Sobey Art Award in 2010.

A posthumous exhibit of his work, “Total Eclipse”, was presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2010. Works included collages, made from underwear, that depict Klaus Nomi and Leigh Bowery, both of whom Munro admired.Reviewing the show in Canadian Art, critic Sholem Krishtalka wrote that Munro’s work is “insistent on the necessity of self-made culture and buttressed by an encyclopedic knowledge of queer underground cultural history.”

Other posthumous exhibitions of his work include a 2011 show at the feminist La Centrale gallery in Montreal – a first for a male artist in that space – and in 2012 a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of York University.

Munro started the monthly party Vaseline (later renamed Vazaleen) in Toronto at a time when most gay clubs featured house music or other types of dance music. His hope was to draw a more diverse crowd: he said at the time, “I’d like to do something that’ll encompass all the freaks out there, myself included.” In addition to its stereotype-countering incorporation of punk and other rock music, his club night was also noted to be unusual for being located outside of the Church and Wellesley gay neighbourhood. It was atypical as well for having about 50 percent women attending the event. Munro said, “I was determined to get women to attend and I did it in a really simple way. I put lots of images of women and dyke icons on the posters and flyers – groups like The Runaways or singers like Nina Hagen and Carole Pope. I wanted women to know instantly that this was their space as much as anybody else’s.” It began in the downstairs space at El Mocambo in late 1999, moved to the upstairs space in January 2000, and in late 2001, when El Mocambo was threatening to close, to Lee’s Palace, where it continued as a monthly event until 2006.

In a lengthy article about Vazaleen in Toronto Life, critic R. M. Vaughan wrote, “In its lewd, spontaneous, hysterical and glamorous way, Vazaleen defined a new Toronto aesthetic, a playful and endlessly inventive mode of presentation that encompassed everything from lesbian prog- rock to tranny camp to vintage punk revival to good old-fashioned loud-mouthed drag.” In an editorial in C magazine, Amish Morrell wrote, “At [Vazaleen] it was not only okay to be gay, but it was okay to be other than gay. One could be just about anything. The effect was that it completely destabilized all preconceptions of gender and sexual identity, in a hyperlibidinous environment where everyone became a performer.” Benjamin Boles of Now wrote, “These days it’s normal in Toronto for hip gay scenes to flourish outside of the queer ghetto and to attract a wide spectrum of genders and orientations, but that didn’t really happen until Vazaleen took off and became a veritable community for everyone who didn’t fit into the mainstream homo world. For too long, it was too rare to see dykes, fags, trans people, and breeders hanging out together, and Munro changed that.” Vazaleen became a launching pad for such musical acts as Peaches and Lesbians on Ecstasy. Other bands performing at Vazaleen early in their careers were The Hidden Cameras, Crystal Castles, and The Gossip. At the height of the event’s popularity, Munro appeared on the cover of Now magazine (made up to look similar to David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album cover), musical guests included Carole Pope, Tracy + the Plastics, Vaginal Davis, and Nina Hagen, and Vazaleen appeared on “best-of” nightclub lists internationally.

Munro produced other Toronto club nights such as Peroxide, which featured electro music, No T. O., which showcased No Wave, Seventh Heaven Dream Disco, and the amateur stripper party Moustache. In 2006, Munro and his friend Lynn MacNeil bought The Beaver Café, in the West Queen West neighbourhood. Arts columnist Murray Whyte of the Toronto Star wrote, “Will’s virtual status as hub took bricks-and-mortar form: The Beaver quickly became that cozy, everyone-in-the-pool house party, a sort of community hall/mini dance club, and an alt-culture oasis”. “Love Saves the Day” became Munro’s dance music night at The Beaver, which he continued to organize even as his illness began to prevent him from leaving home. His final night of DJing in person was at a special Halloween Vazaleen party at Lee’s Palace in 2009.

Bruce LaBruce wrote of Munro’s impact on Toronto, just prior to his death: “As we all know, Toronto can be a cruel and unforgiving city. What makes Will Munro so extraordinary as an artist and as a person is that he has not only remained true to such a harsh mistress, but that he has also contributed so substantially to the fabric and heft of this often maleficent metropolis. His dedication to community work (including volunteering for a decade at an LGBT youth crisis hotline) and to creating social and sexual stimulation for the queer community outside the decaying gay ghetto (namely, his wonderfully raunchy club night, Vazaleen, and his participation as a founding partner in revitalizing the Beaver Café) is unmatched.

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).

Jennifer Murphy is a Toronto-based artist working in collage, assemblage, sculpture and works on paper. She uses a wide range of materials including garbage bags, velvet, silk, gold leaf, balloons, fishing lures and images cut from books. Murphy has shown nationally and internationally, at venues including the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Mercer Union, Toronto; White Columns, New York; and Art Forum, Berlin. In 2006 Murphy was elected to the Ontario long list for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. Recently she participated in the residency A Paper A Drawing A Mountain at the Banff Centre where is created sculpture and works on paper including Magpie. She is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto.

Luke Painter is an artist, educator and researcher living and working in Toronto. Over the past few years his artistic practice has taken on a number of approaches to print, painting, installation and new media. The latest works have been large-scale paintings rendered with India ink and brush on paper that resemble particular tropes of traditional wood engravings. These fictional landscapes and figure pieces enlarge and re-contextualize these tropes to create surreal outdoor spaces or ornamental busts of historical looking individuals. With the lack of human presence these vast manmade looking mountainscapes and vacated wood areas create an unsettling sense of eeriness and loneliness. The repetition, use of ornament and laborious aspect of mark-making within the works is important for referencing this traditional use of woodblock.

Recent exhibitions of his work include numerous exhibitions throughout Toronto, and Par Nature at Bonneau-Samames Art Contemporain in Marseille, France (solo 2009), Pulse New York Art Fair (2009), Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival (2009) and the Athina Art Fair in Greece (2009). Luke has received numerous research and artist grants from Hexagram/Concordia, Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. His work has been reviewed by many notable publications including: Canadian Art, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Now Magazine, Mix Magazine and has recently been included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters.

Sandra Rechico is a Toronto artist whose drawings and installations investigate urban space. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and abroad. Her exhibitions have been featured in numerous publications and she has participated in a number of international residencies. She has also co-curated WADE a city-wide art event in Toronto’s wading pools with Christie Pearson. Rechico is an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph.

Kerri Reid is a visual artist living and working in Toronto, where she teaches at the Toronto School of Art. Born and raised in Vancouver, she studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and the University of Guelph, and has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. Reid’s interview with American artists Harrell Fletcher and Wendy Red Star about their upcoming project co-sponsored by the Art Gallery of Mississauga and the I.D.E.A. Space at Colorado College will appear in Magenta’s Winter 2009 issue.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. A book of his scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing, was recently published by Coach House. He has also edited several books, most recently (with Chris Gehman) The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema. He has a blog, www.fennelplunger.com, as well as a site that archives his work, www.myrectumisnotagrave.com. His research interests include digital video production, motion graphics/animation, rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, the voice and psychoanalysis.

Jade Rude is a Toronto-based artist who creates works that exist in the liminal space between art and design, while employing perception-shifting tactics to playfully examine the relationship between reality and representation. Rude studied social theory in Norway, art and design in England and graduated from the Alberta College of Art. In addition to Canada, including a group show at MOCCA, Rude has exhibited in the US, England, Japan, Columbia and MAMBA in Buenos Aires.

Rupen was born in Istanbul to Armenian parents. He has been a Canadian citizen since the age of fourteen. A self taught artist he has been exhibiting his work for fifteen years and is associated with Gallery 1313. He has had several solo exhibitions as well as participating in over forty group shows: two of which were in New York and two which are upcoming in Seoul, South Korea and St. Petersburg, Russia. His visual art practice is enriched by diverse interests including music, monocromatics, the Toronto art community, and chance. Rupen is the director of the Natural Light Window, an installation venue at 506 Adelaide Street West in Toronto. He was Toronto’s 2004 co-winner of the colour match tournament organized by d’ART magazine. His work has been reviewed in the Globe and Mail, NOW Weekly, Artery, and The National Post. This is Rupen’s second curatorial project for OTMG. The first was titled Front Room in 2003.

Chrysanne Stathacos is a multi-media artist and educator whose work has been exhibited extensively in museums, galleries, sculpture gardens, train stations, and public spaces internationally for twenty-five years. She was born in Buffalo, New York in 1951 and studied fine arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1969-1970); at York University, Toronto (1970-1973); and at the Open Studio, Toronto (1975-1976). Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s Stathacos was active in the Toronto artist-run community, curating projects for A-Space, and co-directing The Gap, a performance art space she co-founded in 1980 with Martin Heath, Colin Lochhead, Elke Town, and David Buchan (1950-1994). In the late 1970s Stathacos became associated with the art collective General Idea, eventually becoming close friends with the group’s founders, AA Bronson (b. 1946), Felix Partz (1945-1994), and Jorge Zontal (1944-1994). Stathacos moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1981 and after two years there relocated to Manhattan, where she co-curated The Abortion Project with Kathe Burkhart (b. 1958) at Artists’ Space and the Simon Watson Gallery, New York in 1991 and the following year collaborated with Hunter Reynolds, aka Patina du Prey (b. 1959), on a performance piece entitled The Banquet at the Thread Waxing Space. Other major works by Stathacos include 1-900, Mirror Mirror (1994), a performance piece; The Wish Machine (1995), her first interactive public art work; The Aura Project (1999-2006); Refuge, a Wish Garden (2002); and The Roses (2006). Noteworthy collaborations in which Stathacos participated include Green Machine (1994), with composer Ben Neill (b. 1957); and One Night, One Garden One Wish (2006), with sound artist Andrew Zealley (b. 1956). Stathacos has received awards from Art Matters (1995), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1998), the Japan Foundation (2001), and the Puffin Foundation (2005). She is represented in numerous public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; the Art Gallery of Hamilton; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester.

Lyla Rye is Toronto based installation artist, who began her studies in architecture. She received a BFA from York University, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited across Canada including at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria; The Power Plant, Toronto; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; The Esplanade Gallery, Medicine Hat; the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston; the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, the Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown and the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto. Her international exhibitions include shows in San Francisco, New York, Adelaide, Paris, and Berlin. She has work in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, York University, Cadillac Fairview Corporation, The Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Harbourfront Centre and Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

Resting my body by the Amazon River I found it easy to idealize life in South America, of course viewing it from a westerner’s perspective. I remembered sitting along side an inner city market on the coast of Ecuador, it was covered in textiles and fruits. I watched a homogenous crowd of people starting off the day by setting up booths and stands to sell products from deep in the jungle and around the lower Andes. There were many children selling cigarettes, gum and lottery tickets or simply wanting to shine your shoes. I realized that most of them had come to the city reluctantly from their villages or towns, fighting their way through the urban chaos because it is their only livelihood option. Ultimately, the picturesque life I idealized among the murky rivers and lush green banana plantations is a daily struggle of economic insecurity and social deprivation for many.

Greatly influenced by my family’s cultural and historical background, I have recognized that I, like many others growing up in a metropolitan city, am a product of cultural hybridization. Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador I have been raised in Canada, in a highly ethnological city of Toronto. I’ve begun to create sculpture in hopes to make sense of my own history and my own reality as an Ecuadorian Canadian.

There is a metamorphose between nostalgia and reality, tenderness and brutality, reason and chaos. These are dualities that are present in my life and in my work. My challenge is to understand the importance of their mutual presence.

For more than 25 years, Cheryl Sourkes has had a prolific career in the art world. It is through photography, and over the last several years through new technologies, that this Toronto artist expresses her ideas and concerns. Recurrent themes in her work include language, time, history, the real world versus the virtual world, and the ways we perceive and understand what we see around us.

University and post-graduate studies in sciences, psychology and biology at McGill University in Montreal and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver directed Sourkes to explore behavioural science, physiological processes and awareness. During her studies she discovered photography. Her work is inspired and shaped by her experience of the world around her. Each body of work is closely related to one another.

Selection and editing are an important part of Sourkes’ artistic process. She accumulates elements that inspire her. In her works from the 1980s, she establishes a link between language, illustration and photography. She creates photographic collages from images and words she obtains from different sources. For almost seven years now, Sourkes has been creating artwork using images pulled from webcams and transforming them into still images or videos. In her artwork she raises questions about time and space, public and private space, as well as our understanding of the real world, the virtual world and the social sphere.

Sourkes’ work is exhibited throughout the world and featured in several public and private collections such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, Air Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Concordia University Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Canada. She regularly writes articles for various publications and frequently curates exhibitions.

Derek Sullivan was born in 1976 in Richmond Hill, Ontario. He received a BFA from York University and an MFA from the University of Guelph. His multiple National Gallery Catalogue 2004 was included in the exhibition Art Metropole The Top 100 at the National Gallery of Canada (2007). Recently his work was featured in the group exhibitions We Can Do This Now at The Power Plant in Toronto (2007) and Gasoline Rainbows at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2007). He is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

Josh Thorpe is an artist, writer, and musician living in Toronto. He has a Master’s in Visual Studies from University of Toronto and he works at ERA Architects and Cove & Ovolo. His work has been shown in Canada, the US, and Europe. In 2009 Art Metropole published Thorpe’s first book, Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide.

Born in Saskatoon in 1970. Lives and works in Vancouver.

With a practice that includes photography, performance, video, sound and book works, Althea Thauberger’s theatrically grounded, socially oriented works question the boundaries between fiction and reality in the context of community and identity. Often working in collaboration with her subjects—who range from aspiring teenaged singer/songwriters to US military wives to female combat soldiers in Afghanistan—Thauberger offers varied perspectives on the impact of individuals and groups on the margins of historical or cultural awareness. Site-specificity is another recurring strategy; her 2012 video installation Marat Sade Bohnice utilizes a mental institute in Prague to restage the Peter Weiss play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. A graduate of Concordia University and the University of Victoria, Thauberger was shortlisted for the 2004 Sobey Art Award and the 2011 Grange Prize. Her work has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions, including the 2012 Liverpool Biennial and the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.

Joanne Tod chose to use paint as her medium in the mid-1970s and continues to work as a painter. She received her fine arts education at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto from 1970 to 1974. She works on a grand scale: her figurative works tend toward high illusionism, displaying brilliant hues. Through her paintings, she has consistently been critical of the status the medium has held in art history.

The most common subjects in her paintings have been women and interiors. Various arrangements of these have allowed her to comment on the ironies of image, power, and glamour in our culture. Of late, she has eliminated figures from her work and instead features elaborate public interiors. The figures that are central in Having Fun? (1984) and The Time of Our Lives (1984) have been replaced by interrupted spaces, such as those in See the Rushes (1991) and A Significant Reveal (1990). She found that the figures became a distraction to her principal interest of constructing a pictorial space.

Ron Tran (b. 1972, Saigon, VN) lives and works in Vancouver. Tran studied Integrated Media Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He works across various media, from performance to sculpture, photography, video and installation. Tran has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Confederation Centre Art Gallery and his work will be featured in Avant-Gardes of the 21st Century publish by Phaidon Press.

Recent solo exhibitions include Away To Go, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2011); It Knows Not What It Is, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2011); Stranger Circumstances, Crawl Space, Seattle, USA (2009); And You Can Do Anything With Them Under Such Circumstances…, Lawrence Eng Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2008); and Distance From A Table To A Chair, The Village And Other Things, Neon Gallery, Brösarp, Sweden (2007).

Tran has also exhibited in numerous group exhibitions such as Phantasmagoria, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2012); Reality, 6th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2010); Triumphant Carrot: The Persistence of Still Life, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2010); Thermostat: Video and the Pacific Northwest, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, USA (2009); and EAST International 2007, Norwich Gallery, England (2007).

Adrienne Trent is a Toronto based artist. After graduating from the Ontario College of Art in the 80’s, she went on to exhibit her art, both nationally and internationally. She was a co-founder of Republic and is a former member of Red Head Gallery. She has had exhibits in commercial galleries such as Robert Birch, Edward Day, Deleon White, Lonsdale and Virginia Macdonnell Galleries. She has also exhibited in public galleries such as the Art Gallery of Clarington, Koffler Gallery, Justina M. Barnicke at the University of Toronto, Robert Langen at Sir Wilfred Laurier University, and McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. As well, artist-run spaces; Artspace in Peterborough, White Water Gallery in North Bay, Mercer Union, La Centrale in Montreal, and SAW Gallery in Ottawa. Adrienne has also curated a number of exhibitions in conjunction with both Republic, Red Head, and with Visual Arts Ontario, where she was the head of the Colour Reprography programme for artists from 1994 to 1998.

RM Vaughan is a Toronto-based writer and video artist. His previous books include the poetry collections A Selection of Dazzling Scarves, Invisible to Predators and Ruined Stars; the novels A Quilted Heart and Spells; and the play collections Camera, Woman and The Monster Trilogy. Vaughan writes about art and culture for numerous periodicals and currently pens a weekly celebrity-pestering column for The Globe and Mail. Vaughan’s videos are shown in galleries and festivals around the world.

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.

Julie Voyce was born in 1957 in Woodstock, Ontario. She Studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto. Since the early 1980s, she has shown her work extensively in Canada and has had exhibitions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and Italy. Her practice has been documented in writings and exhibition catalogues by Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario; University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Waterloo, Ontario and Struts Gallery, Sackville, New Brunswick. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections including those of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal; Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga and Osler Hoskin and Harcourt, Toronto. In addition to drawing, painting and printmaking, Voyce has engaged in several book and mail art projects, often collaboratively. In 2004, she was awarded Artist of the Year Award by the by the Untitled Art Awards in Toronto. She lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Formed in 1979, FASTWURMS is the cultural project, trademark, and shared authorhsip of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse.

FASTWURMS creates poly-disciplinary artworks that mix performance and performative events into the context of immersive installations, collective making and social exchange projects.

FASTWURMS artwork is characterized by a determined DIY sensibility, Witch Nation identity politics, and a keen allegiance towards working class, queer alliance, and artist collaborations.

FASTWURMS is a Witch polity and epistemology, creating and circulating aesthetic knowledge as a shared emancipation and liberation narrative.