Current Exhibition

Scream: Ed Pien and Samonie Toonoo

June 10 – August 21, 2010
Opening: Thursday, June 10, 6:00 to 8:00 pm

Curated by Nancy Campbell

(Left to Right): Samonie Toonoo, Skull, 2008. Courtesy Feheley Fine Arts.  Ed Pien, After the Meal, 1999. Courtesy Birch Libralato Gallery.

Edvard Munch’s well-known—and much written about— painting, The Scream, was created in 1893, and is widely considered to represent the universal anxiety of modern man. It depicts a screaming figure with a skull-like face, who appears to be in the throes of an unknown emotional crisis.  This image is now one of the most familiar in art history, having been adapted and reused in the popular arts in a myriad of ways. Undoubtedly, our continued fascination with The Scream reflects the universality of anxiety in contemporary life. The exhibition Scream explores this ongoing fascination through the work of Ed Pien and Samonie Toonoo. 

Samonie Toonoo, an artist from the remote community of Cape Dorset, Baffin Island, has likely not seen The Scream or heard of Ed Pien.  However, although it is a stretch to compare Inuit soapstone sculpture to contemporary drawing, let alone late-nineteenth-century Symbolist painting, the similarities between the two artists's interests are striking. Toonoo was born in 1969. He has been carving for a number of years and his art typically represents transformation scenes drawn from Inuit folklore and nature. In an interview Toonoo describes his sculptures as a release of the “stuff in his head”; hence their sometimes cryptic and often frightening quality. His most recent body of work is highly personal, seeming to reflect the different aspects of his life. Like his contemporaries, Toonoo has broken out of the prescribed expectations of Inuit art, forging a new vocabulary to interpret and represent the world. 

Established Toronto-based artist Ed Pien was born on the other side of the world in Taiwan in 1958 and immigrated to Canada when he was eleven.  Pien’s ghosts of Taiwanese folklore and his representations of western Hell also play to the anxieties of contemporary life. Pien has continued to make use of a quick and prolific mode of drawing he developed, sometimes assembling multiple drawings into composite works or employing the wet ink as a mono-print to start a new image. These drawings, some taking three minutes, others intricately constructed over time, are immediate and intuitive, exploring primal fears and otherness. 

The exhibition Scream: Ed Pien and Samonie Toonoo follows last summer's critically acclaimed exhibition Noise Ghost: Shary Boyle and Shuvinai Asoona, continuing curator Nancy Campbell's interests in spinning the expectation of Inuit art by positioning the work alongside contemporary work from the south.

Please note: The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery will be closed from Thursday June 24 - Monday June 28.

 

 

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Extended throughout the summer of 2010

Adrian Blackwell: Model for a Public Space [knot], 2010

Curated by Maiko Tanaka as part of Extra-curricular: Between Art & Pedagogy, Part II
Please visit the project website for more information: www.extra-curricular.info

Exhibition Dates: March through August, 2010
Reception: March 4, 2010, 5-7pm
Location: Hart House Reading Room, University of Toronto

Open to the public during Hart House regular hours

Adrian Blackwell, Research collage for Model for a Public Space [knot], 2010. Image courtesy of the artist.

Toronto artist/architect Adrian Blackwell presents a new instance of Model for a public space, a site-specific installation concerned with the inevitably knotted nature of public discourses, how they intertwine, affect, antagonize, fold over themselves, and flee in different directions.

Consisting of a set of concentric bleachers Model for a public space [knot] provides singular locations for divergent perspectives while allowing a large number of people to sit and talk comfortably in close proximity to one another. The work considers both senses of the word ‘model’. It is at once a projective idea about how people relate to one another and a temporary maquette. It acts as both an idea or diagram, and a material object, an experiment in the relation between form and social engagement.

AModel for a Public Space [knot], 2010. Photo: Marko Bursac.

In addition to being the site for various discussions taking place during the second phase of the Extra-curricular conference (Part 2. Beyond Institutions), and Special Programming, “Two conversations on the intersection between love and politics in contemporary art”, organized by Adrian Blackwell and Christine Shaw, the knotted structure is open for daily activity. It can also be booked by individuals or groups interested in engaging in non-hierarchical discussion for up to three hours. (Booking information and schedules can be obtained by contacting Maiko Tanaka at info@extra-curricular.info

Adrian Blackwell is a visual artist and architectural and urban designer whose work has been exhibited at artist-run centres and museums across Canada. He is a member of the Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry and the editorial collective of the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture, Landscape and Political Economy. In 2009 he collaborated with Jane Hutton to design and build Dymaxion Sleep for the International Garden Festival in Metis, Quebec. He teaches architecture and urban design at the University of Toronto.

Model for a Public Space [knot] has been generously supported by Hart House, University of Toronto, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council.

Please visit the project website for more information: www.extra-curricular.info