Art Metropole

Jill Henderson is a Scottish/Canadian artist born in Scotland in 1969 and graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a BA honours in Fine Art in 1991 and a Masters in Fine Art in 1993.

From 1991 to 1993 she exhibited in Scotland and Europe including The ICA in London, Overgaden Gallery (Copenhagen), Tramway and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland.

In 1994 Jill Henderson moved to Toronto, Canada and began exhibiting in Toronto and all over Canada, showing at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), The Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and The New Gallery (Calgary). She also started to be represented by Fine art dealers Wynick Tuck Gallery, Toronto, from 1995 to the present day. She also exhibited at Transmission Gallery (Glasgow), YYZ (Toronto), Art Metropole (Toronto), Catalyst Arts (Belfast), Hales Gallery (London UK), Angelus Novus (Antwerp), Brasilica (Vienna) and Vox Populi (Philadelphia). During this time Jill Henderson also co-founded and ran ‘Free Parking’ an artist run gallery project in downtown Toronto, as well as curating a number of exhibitions.

In the year 2000, Jill Henderson was asked to exhibit at PS1 centre for contemporary Art / MOMA in the widely acclaimed exhibition “Greater New York”. In 2001, Jill Henderson was also asked to exhibit as one of seven Canadian artists chosen for an international exchange exhibition and seminar in Taipei, Taiwan curated by Manray Hsu. Since 2001 she has exhibited at The Art Directors Club (NYC), Lothringer 13 (Munich), Morris & Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Manif d’Art 2 (Quebec), The Americas Society (NYC) and Solo shows at The Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver) and the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). She was also nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany award.

She has received numerous awards from The Canada Council, The Scottish Arts Council and The Ontario Arts Council. She was also recently made a lifetime member of Art Metropole, Toronto. Her work is also in the collection of The Robert McLauglin Museum in Oshawa, Canada and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, as well as in numerous private collections.

Jill Henderson is a Scottish/Canadian artist born in Scotland in 1969 and graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a BA honours in Fine Art in 1991 and a Masters in Fine Art in 1993.

From 1991 to 1993 she exhibited in Scotland and Europe including The ICA in London, Overgaden Gallery (Copenhagen), Tramway and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland.

In 1994 Jill Henderson moved to Toronto, Canada and began exhibiting in Toronto and all over Canada, showing at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), The Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and The New Gallery (Calgary). She also started to be represented by Fine art dealers Wynick Tuck Gallery, Toronto, from 1995 to the present day. She also exhibited at Transmission Gallery (Glasgow), YYZ (Toronto), Art Metropole (Toronto), Catalyst Arts (Belfast), Hales Gallery (London UK), Angelus Novus (Antwerp), Brasilica (Vienna) and Vox Populi (Philadelphia). During this time Jill Henderson also co-founded and ran ‘Free Parking’ an artist run gallery project in downtown Toronto, as well as curating a number of exhibitions.

In the year 2000, Jill Henderson was asked to exhibit at PS1 centre for contemporary Art / MOMA in the widely acclaimed exhibition “Greater New York”. In 2001, Jill Henderson was also asked to exhibit as one of seven Canadian artists chosen for an international exchange exhibition and seminar in Taipei, Taiwan curated by Manray Hsu. Since 2001 she has exhibited at The Art Directors Club (NYC), Lothringer 13 (Munich), Morris & Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Manif d’Art 2 (Quebec), The Americas Society (NYC) and Solo shows at The Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver) and the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). She was also nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany award.

She has received numerous awards from The Canada Council, The Scottish Arts Council and The Ontario Arts Council. She was also recently made a lifetime member of Art Metropole, Toronto. Her work is also in the collection of The Robert McLauglin Museum in Oshawa, Canada and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, as well as in numerous private collections.

John Giorno (born 1936) is an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963). He is also an AIDS activist and fundraiser, and a long-time practitioner of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

Giorno was born in New York. He graduated from Columbia University in 1958, where he was a “college chum” of physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer. In 1962, while in his early twenties he briefly worked in New York as a stockbroker. In 1962 he met Andy Warhol during Warhol’s first New York Pop Art solo exhibit at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. They became lovers and Warhol remained an important influence for Giorno’s developments on poetry, performance and recordings. Giorno and Warhol are said to have remained very close until 1964, after which time their meetings were rare. Their relationship was revived somewhat in the last year before Warhol’s death. Inspired by Warhol, and subsequent relationships with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Giorno began applying Pop Art techniques of appropriation of found imagery to his poetry, producing The American Book of the Dead in 1964 (published in part in his first book, Poems, in 1967). Meetings with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in 1964 contributed to his interest in applying cut up and montage techniques to found texts, and (via Gysin) his first audio poem pieces, one of which was played at the Paris Museum of Modern Art Biennale in 1965.

Inspired by Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology events of 1966, Giorno began making Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments, working in collaboration with synthesizer creator Robert Moog and others to create psychedelic poetry installation/happenings at venues such as St. Mark’s Church in New York. In 1965, Giorno founded a not-for-profit production company, Giorno Poetry Systems, in order to connect poetry to new audiences, using innovative technologies. In 1967, Giorno organized the first Dial-A-Poem event at the Architectural League of New York, making short poems by various contemporary poets available over the telephone. The piece was repeated to considerable acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and resulted in a series of LP records compiling the recordings, which were issued by Giorno Poetry Systems. Some of the poets and artists who recorded or collaborated with Giorno Poetry Systems were Burroughs, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Giorno’s text-based poetry evolved rapidly in the late 1960s from direct appropriation of entire texts from newspapers, to montage of radically different types of textual material, to the development of his signature double-column poems, which feature extensive use of repetition both across columns and down the page. This device allowed Giorno to mimic the echoes and distortions he was applying to his voice in performance. A number of these poems were collected in Balling Buddha (1970). The poems also feature increasingly radical political content, and Giorno was involved in a number of protests against the Vietnam war. Spiro Agnew called Giorno and Abbie Hoffman “would be Hanoi Hannahs” after their WPAX radio broadcasts made to the US troops in South Vietnam on Radio Hanoi.
Giorno travelled to India in 1971 where he met H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism. He became one of the earliest Western students of Tibetan Buddhism, and has participated in Buddhist communities for several decades, inviting various Tibetan teachers to New York and hosting them. His poetry has reflected Buddhist and other Asian religious themes from the beginning, but the poems in Cancer In My Left Ball (1972) and those that follow involve a highly original interpenetration of Buddhist and Western avant-garde practices and poetics.

Touring rock clubs in the 1970s with Burroughs, Giorno continued to develop an amplified, confrontational performance poetry that was highly influential on what became the Poetry Slam scene, as well as the performance art of Karen Finley and Penny Arcade, and the early Industrial music of Throbbing Gristle and Suicide. In 1982 he made the album Who Are You Staring At? with Glenn Branca and is prominently featured in Ron Mann’s 1982 film Poetry in Motion. He stopped using found elements in his poetry in the early 1980s and has since pursued a kind of experimental realism, incantatory and repetitive yet at the same time lyrical.
Giorno has celebrated queer sexuality from the 1964 Pornographic Poem, through his psychedelic evocations of gay New York nightlife in the 1970s, to more recent poems such as Just Say No To Family Values. He founded an AIDS charity, the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984, which continues to give direct financial and other support to individuals with AIDS to the present day.

In addition to his collaborations with Burroughs, Giorno has produced 55 LPs, tapes, videos and books. He continues to perform at poetry festivals and events, notably in Europe where he has been an active participant in the sound poetry scene for several decades.

Giorno formerly lived at 255 East 74th Street, when a small carriage house was located on the property.

In 2007 he appeared in Nine Poems in Basilicata, a film directed by Antonello Faretta based on his poems and his performances. In addition to his solo performances in live poetry shows, he has collaborated since 2005 in some music-poetry shows with Spanish rock singer and composer Javier Colis.
The first career-spanning collection of Giorno’s poems, Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962–2007, edited by Marcus Boon, was published by Soft Skull in 2008.

In 2010, Giorno had his first one-person gallery show in New York, entitled Black Paintings and Drawings, at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, wherein he exhibited works that chronicled the evolution of the poem painting. The first Poem Prints were part of the Dial-A-Poem installation in the 1970 exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art. Connecting words and images, the poet uses the materiality of the written word to confront audiences with poetry in different contexts.

In 2011, he starred in one of two versions for the music video to R.E.M.‘s final single We All Go Back to Where We Belong.

(from wikipedia)

John Giorno (born 1936) is an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963). He is also an AIDS activist and fundraiser, and a long-time practitioner of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

Giorno was born in New York. He graduated from Columbia University in 1958, where he was a “college chum” of physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer. In 1962, while in his early twenties he briefly worked in New York as a stockbroker. In 1962 he met Andy Warhol during Warhol’s first New York Pop Art solo exhibit at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. They became lovers and Warhol remained an important influence for Giorno’s developments on poetry, performance and recordings. Giorno and Warhol are said to have remained very close until 1964, after which time their meetings were rare. Their relationship was revived somewhat in the last year before Warhol’s death. Inspired by Warhol, and subsequent relationships with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Giorno began applying Pop Art techniques of appropriation of found imagery to his poetry, producing The American Book of the Dead in 1964 (published in part in his first book, Poems, in 1967). Meetings with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in 1964 contributed to his interest in applying cut up and montage techniques to found texts, and (via Gysin) his first audio poem pieces, one of which was played at the Paris Museum of Modern Art Biennale in 1965.

Inspired by Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology events of 1966, Giorno began making Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments, working in collaboration with synthesizer creator Robert Moog and others to create psychedelic poetry installation/happenings at venues such as St. Mark’s Church in New York. In 1965, Giorno founded a not-for-profit production company, Giorno Poetry Systems, in order to connect poetry to new audiences, using innovative technologies. In 1967, Giorno organized the first Dial-A-Poem event at the Architectural League of New York, making short poems by various contemporary poets available over the telephone. The piece was repeated to considerable acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and resulted in a series of LP records compiling the recordings, which were issued by Giorno Poetry Systems. Some of the poets and artists who recorded or collaborated with Giorno Poetry Systems were Burroughs, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Giorno’s text-based poetry evolved rapidly in the late 1960s from direct appropriation of entire texts from newspapers, to montage of radically different types of textual material, to the development of his signature double-column poems, which feature extensive use of repetition both across columns and down the page. This device allowed Giorno to mimic the echoes and distortions he was applying to his voice in performance. A number of these poems were collected in Balling Buddha (1970). The poems also feature increasingly radical political content, and Giorno was involved in a number of protests against the Vietnam war. Spiro Agnew called Giorno and Abbie Hoffman “would be Hanoi Hannahs” after their WPAX radio broadcasts made to the US troops in South Vietnam on Radio Hanoi.
Giorno travelled to India in 1971 where he met H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism. He became one of the earliest Western students of Tibetan Buddhism, and has participated in Buddhist communities for several decades, inviting various Tibetan teachers to New York and hosting them. His poetry has reflected Buddhist and other Asian religious themes from the beginning, but the poems in Cancer In My Left Ball (1972) and those that follow involve a highly original interpenetration of Buddhist and Western avant-garde practices and poetics.

Touring rock clubs in the 1970s with Burroughs, Giorno continued to develop an amplified, confrontational performance poetry that was highly influential on what became the Poetry Slam scene, as well as the performance art of Karen Finley and Penny Arcade, and the early Industrial music of Throbbing Gristle and Suicide. In 1982 he made the album Who Are You Staring At? with Glenn Branca and is prominently featured in Ron Mann’s 1982 film Poetry in Motion. He stopped using found elements in his poetry in the early 1980s and has since pursued a kind of experimental realism, incantatory and repetitive yet at the same time lyrical.
Giorno has celebrated queer sexuality from the 1964 Pornographic Poem, through his psychedelic evocations of gay New York nightlife in the 1970s, to more recent poems such as Just Say No To Family Values. He founded an AIDS charity, the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984, which continues to give direct financial and other support to individuals with AIDS to the present day.

In addition to his collaborations with Burroughs, Giorno has produced 55 LPs, tapes, videos and books. He continues to perform at poetry festivals and events, notably in Europe where he has been an active participant in the sound poetry scene for several decades.

Giorno formerly lived at 255 East 74th Street, when a small carriage house was located on the property.

In 2007 he appeared in Nine Poems in Basilicata, a film directed by Antonello Faretta based on his poems and his performances. In addition to his solo performances in live poetry shows, he has collaborated since 2005 in some music-poetry shows with Spanish rock singer and composer Javier Colis.
The first career-spanning collection of Giorno’s poems, Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962–2007, edited by Marcus Boon, was published by Soft Skull in 2008.

In 2010, Giorno had his first one-person gallery show in New York, entitled Black Paintings and Drawings, at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, wherein he exhibited works that chronicled the evolution of the poem painting. The first Poem Prints were part of the Dial-A-Poem installation in the 1970 exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art. Connecting words and images, the poet uses the materiality of the written word to confront audiences with poetry in different contexts.

In 2011, he starred in one of two versions for the music video to R.E.M.‘s final single We All Go Back to Where We Belong.

(from wikipedia)

Shrigley was born in Macclesfield on 17 September 1968, the younger of two children born to Rita (née Bowring) and Joseph Shrigley.[citation needed] He moved with his parents and sister to Oadby, Leicestershire, when he was two years old. He did the Art and Design Foundation course at the Leicester Polytechnic in 1987, and then studied Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991.

Although he works in various media, he is best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons released in softcover books or postcard packs.

Shrigley finds humour in flat depictions of the inconsequential, the unavailing and the bizarre – although he is far fonder of violent or otherwise disquieting subject matter. Shrigley’s work has two of the characteristics often encountered in outsider art – an odd viewpoint, and (in some of his work) a deliberately limited technique. His freehand line is often weak, which jars with his frequent use of a ruler; his forms are often very crude; and annotations in his drawings are poorly executed and frequently contain crossings-out (In authentic outsider art, the artist has no choice but to produce work in his or her own way, even if that work is unconventional in content and inept in execution. In contrast, it is likely that Shrigley has chosen his style and range of subject matter for comic effect).

As well as authoring several books, he directed the video for Blur’s “Good Song” and also for Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “Agnes, Queen of Sorrow”. In 2005 designed a London Underground leaflet cover. Since 2005, he has contributed a cartoon for The Guardian’s Weekend magazine every Saturday. Other projects have included the album Worried Noodles (Tom Lab, 2007) where musicians interpret his writings as lyrics, including collaborations by David Byrne, Hot Chip, and Franz Ferdinand.

Shrigley co-directed an animate!-commissioned film with director Chris Shepherd called Who I Am And What I Want, based on Shrigley’s book of the same title. Kevin Eldon voiced its main character, Pete. He also produced a series of drawings and T-shirt designs for the 2006 Triptych festival, a Scottish music festival lasting for three to four days in three cities. He has also designed twelve different covers for Deerhoof’s 2007 record, Friend Opportunity.

Shrigley is a supporter of Nottingham Forest FC.[citation needed]

Shrigley is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris.

Jason Mraz took the name of his album We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. from a work by Shrigley.

In 2006, Shrigley’s first spoken-word album Shrigley Forced To Speak With Others was released by Azuli Records. In October 2007, Tomlab released Worried Noodles, a double-CD of artists including David Byrne, Islands, Liars, Grizzly Bear, Mount Eerie, R. Stevie Moore and Final Fantasy putting Shrigley’s 2005 book of the same name to music. Moore went on to record an entire album of new songs set to Shrigley’s Worried Noodles lyrics called Shrigley Field.

His spoken-word readings are used on the Late Night Tales series of recordings, with a track from Shrigley closing each album.

(from wikipedia)

Shoplifter is an artist from Iceland whose work has been shown and published all over the world, especially in New York City where she lives with her family. Her body of work as a whole exists in the gray area between visual art, performance, and design.

Shoplifter has worked for several years exploring the use and symbolic nature of hair, and its visual and artistic potential. For Shoplifter hair is the ultimate thread that grows from our body. Hair is an original, creative fiber, a way for people to distinguish themselves as individuals, and often an art form.

Humor plays a large roll in her life and work, sometimes subtly, but other times taking over. This humor extends to her love of playing with the juxtaposition of opposites. Like with her hair pieces- they appear beautiful evoking natural forms and plant life, but at the same time hair is considered grotesque and disturbing when it is not attached to the body, like hair in the shower drain.

While hair is her most commonly used material she has never been limited to any one material or category of art. She loves to study all possible channels and use any material that a project calls for that at first might not seem to have a connection to visual art, but leads there in the end. She uses traditional handcraft techniques like knitting, weaving, and braiding to create new forms of textiles, while referring to established methods in art. She is attracted to the playfulness found in folk art, naïvism, and handicraft which all have a strong influence on her organic process of creating work.

Her work is simultaneously comical, romantic, silly and beautiful with the theme of vanity as a connecting thread. Through the ages people have been so imaginative in the way they make beautiful things for themselves and others by using materials from their nearby environment. This aspect present in every culture, whether driven by vanity and narcissism or a simple desire for beauty, is vanity in its best form.

“I think the most beautiful element in the world is the pure desire to decorate and beautify your self.” -Shoplifter

“In a perfect world I would be one happy mother fucker,” David Kramer declares in a drawing of a beautiful woman posing next to a convertible. “I want to know how the other half lives,” he announces in another of a six-pack of Bud with three cans missing. Such desire is the driving force behind Kramer’s comedic drawings, videos, and sculptures. Perceived inadequacies at work or awkwardness at parties are magnified by juxtaposing his self-deprecating stories with the clichéd expectations of success and splendor showcased in the unreal world of flashy advertising and popular culture.

This exhibition includes over 50 of his trademark sardonic drawings, three sculptures and a video work. The Gallery’s back viewing area is converted into Old Man Bar, a tableau of a gritty local lounge where long afternoons can be wiled away drinking beers. Playing on the TV behind the bar is the 1940’s style DVD Million Dollar Moment, Kramer’s autobiographical parody of the film classic The Fountainhead, which reenacts the true story of a mix-up in names that accidentally brought Kramer to the attention of a prominent Chelsea gallery. Other sculptures include a life-sized enlargement of the common bar figurine of a hobo leaning against a lamppost, and a Las Vegas inspired circular settee with a working fountain of stacked champagne glasses as its center.

Kramer’s art as a whole demonstrates the disparity between the artist’s everyday reality and the ersatz glamour and glitz of the elusive “good life”, reminding us that the desire for an idealized success is a constant benchmark against which we measure our actual achievements.

David Kramer was born in New York City. His artworks and performances have been appreciated across the United States, Canada and Europe.

Ross Sinclair is an artist and musician and writer who also teaches. In 1994 Sinclair had the tattoo, Real Life, inked on his back and since then his work has taken the form of a simultaneous celebration and commiseration of the paradigm of The Real – from the inside out, and always in relation to a particular context and audience. He has described the Real Life character he has utilised in many works since then like a character a writer would use in a series of books, appearing in different settings while remaining essentially the same through all the challenges and context of the different projects he has made. Sinclair employs many formal devices including performance and painting, installation and music, often all at the same time.

Since the late ‘80’s he has shown in hundreds of group and solo exhibitions in the UK, Europe and beyond, producing various monographs on his artworks, notably If North Was South and East Was West, (Badischer Kunstverein, 2004) as well as writing texts and essays in various books and publications. He continues to make music, often in relation to his artworks and periodically releases these songs in some form or other, most recently in the L.P. Everything Flows, Experimental art into music (Patricia Fleming Projects 2012). His work is held in many collections, The Scottish Arts Council, The British Council, Arts Council of England, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, England, The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, Stirling District Council, Sammlung Hauser & Wirth, St Gallen, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Collection Lambert, Avignon, France, and Private Collections, Switzerland, Germany, UK, France, USA, Hong Kong.

Sinclair’s Real Life projects, have often sought to re-imagine the relationships in our society through an ongoing investigation of the many institutions and constructs social / political / economic / cultural / geographic/ historic to which we all are inextricably linked as individuals, and collectively. Over the last 20 years, an important thread of Sinclair’s work has sought to address the very particular nature of the individual, collective and national identities of the small damp Northern-European nation sometimes known as Scotland. The Real Life Gordons of Huntly, 1318 – 2011 is the latest manifestation of this series. That work and many others from the series are discussed in the book We ♥ Real Life Scotland published by Deveron Arts in 2012.

Sinclair has won various international prizes, most notably a Creative Scotland Award, 2007, the Baloise, Statements prize at the Basel Art fair in 2001, Arendt Oetker Atelier Stipendium, Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst, Leipzig, 1999 and was the recipient of a Hamlyn Award 1998-2000. He is currently a Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art.

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.