Toronto

In 1911, when Arthur Goss was hired as Toronto's first official photographer, the city was at a critical juncture. Industry expansion and population growth produced pressing concerns about housing shortages, sanitation, and the health and welfare of citizens. Dispelling popular misconceptions, Picturing Toronto demonstrates that Goss and other photographers did not simply document the changing conditions of urban life - their photography contributed to the development of modern Toronto and shaped its inhabitants. Drawing on archival sources from the early twentieth century, Sarah Bassnett investigates how a range of groups, including the municipal government, social reformers, and the press, used photography to reconfigure the urban environment and constitute liberal subjects. Through a series of case studies, including the construction of the Bloor Viaduct, civic beautification plans, urban reform in "the Ward," immigration and citizenship, and Goss's portrait photography, Bassnett exposes how photographs were at the heart of debates over what the city should look like, how it should operate, and under what conditions it was appropriate for people to live. This lavishly illustrated book is the first study to treat images as vital elements that shaped Toronto's social and political history. Interdisciplinary in its approach, Picturing Toronto displays the complex entanglements between photography and urban modernity.

Toronto Makes features over 50 of the city's most exciting creative entrepreneurs sharing the stories behind the crafts they've dedicated their lives to. This beautifully photographed and designed volume celebrates bakers and brewers, fashion and jewellery designers, furniture makers and ceramicists, and many more--an eclectic group of incredibly talented people who make Toronto a little more special. Toronto Makes pairs engaging profiles by Toronto writer Randi Bergman artful photos of the people and products of Bather, Bellwoods Brewery, Biko, Coolican & Company, CXBO Chocolates by Brandon Olsen, F. Miller Skincare, Mary Young, Mima Ceramics, Pilot Coffee Roasters, Province Apothecary, Rekindle, Sloane Tea, and many more. This captivating collection illuminates the complex stories things made with a passion that will impress and inspire.

This publication is produced on the occasion of the Toronto Biennial of Art, The Shoreline Dilemma, September 21-December 1, 2019, and What Water Knows, the Land Remembers, March 26-June 5, 2022, organized by the curatorial team of Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson, and Tairone Bastien, with contributions from former TBA Public Programming and Learning Curators Clare Butcher and Myung-Sun Kim. Included are additional projects by 2019 guest curator Charles Stankevich and 2022 Curatorial Fellows Chiedza Pasipanodya and Sebastien De Line.

The GTA21 publication, designed by Toronto studio Blok Design, includes interviews between the 21 participating artists/collectives and the curators of the exhibition, images of existing works and those in process, and contributions by writers Dionne Brand, Sheila Heti, and John Paul Ricco.

While on the surface this book appears as a catalogue of the exhibition Migrating the Margins held at the Art Gallery of York University (15 September to 3 December 2017), it is rather a stand-alone monograph that uses the exhibition as a springboard for a larger consideration of recent developments in the re-orientation of the Toronto art scene, from one dominated by the centre/downtown where, at best, the margins (the suburbs and underrepresented communities), are addressed in terms of their relationship to that centre. Using a Glissantian framework [Eduard Glissant], the authors posit that the art scene, and culture at large, is in the process of shifting, where the margins, the suburbs, are beginning to circumvent the downtown, speaking not from periphery to centre but rather from periphery to periphery. In the process, the periphery overrules the logic of centre/periphery, establishing rather a circuitous network that does not privilege any one particular location.

How do artists in Toronto visualise their sense of place? Are there particular 'made-in-Toronto' ways of thinking about the city? With work selected by internationally renowned Toronto-basedartist Luis Jacob, Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto considers the ways in which artists visualise Toronto, throughout a period of fifty years. Presenting a thematic clustering of works by 86 artists, the book is premised on the tendency of artists in the city to favour performative and allegorical procedures to articulate their sense of place. Four gestures--mapping, modelling, performing and congregating-- serve as guideposts to a diverse array of artistic practices. The book is a constellation of symbolic forms, or memes, that repeatedly appear in the work of artists of different generations; it presents a panorama of the blueprints that artists have drafted over many decades to give form to life in one of North America's largest cities. The book features work by artists such as Suzy Lake, Kent Monkman, Ed Pien, Roula Partheniou and Michael Snow, all of whom have previously published with Black Dog Press. It includes historical documents gathered from local archives, as well as contemporary ephemera.

Exploring the experimental energy of an era, Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 brings together more than 100 works by 65 artists and collectives to highlight an innovative period in Toronto art history. Amidst the social and political upheavals of their time, the artists that emerged in Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s pushed the boundaries of conventional painting, sculpture, and photography, exploring new ways of art making. Organized thematically and punctuated by references to Toronto and its cityscape, this unique publication highlights the era's preoccupation with ideas of performance, the body, the image, self-portraiture, storytelling, and representation. Featured artists include Michael Snow, Joanne Tod, the Clichettes, Duke Redbird, Barbara Astman, Robin Collyer, Robert Houle, Carol Condé, and Carl Beveridge, as well as photographer June Clarke, illustrator Ato Seitu, dub poet Lillian Allen, and many others.

Everyday objects transformed into an extraordinary elephant sculpture Over the past two decades, British Columbia-based Indigenous artist Brian Jungen (born 1970) has become internationally recognized for his imaginative body of sculpture using repurposed material. This book takes a deep dive into his process and influences in the creation of a monumental elephant sculpture made out of couches--the first-ever public art commission at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Generously illustrated, the book offers a significant visual record from early sketches and ideas through to production, transportation and installation. It details Jungen's deep material explorations which highlight a long history of inequality, a concern for the environment and a profound commitment to Indigenous ways of knowing and making. A timeline from Henry Moore's public sculpture The Archerto Couch Monstersets Jungen's career in context, and an interview between AGO Chief Curator Julian Cox and Jungen looks at the development of the project.

Through a series of focused and interconnected case studies, Out of School explores the long history of information art associated with the Toronto School of Communication. It highlights the perspectives of artists inspired by the speculations of Marshall McLuhan and colleagues as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the Toronto School's ideas about information.Using pre-Internet media such as telex and the telecopier, the artists explored in this book materialized visionary concepts of information without the aid of computers. Harbingers of contemporary digital culture, Bertram Brooker, N.E. Thing Co., Robert Smithson, Wyndham Lewis, General Idea, and other artists approached information as something embodied, sensorial, and social. Art historian Adam Lauder recontextualizes this qualitative philosophy of information in relation to quantitative discourses and methodologies, which these creative figures make visible - sometimes inadvertently or satirically - through artworks that operate at the interface between art and business. While exploring how utopian information ontologies struggled to account for markers of identity and difference, including Indigeneity, gender, and sexual diversity, this book also highlights instances when information art was able to carve out spaces of agency and resistance.Offering an essential reassessment of the legacies of the Toronto School of Communication, Out of School broadens the network of practitioners connected to the school to include visual artists active both within and beyond Canada. In doing so, it proposes that artists made significant contributions to theory in their own right.

A compendium of descriptive, speculative prose and text-images by the Governor General's Award-winning artist, Tom Sherman. Its contents sweep across five decades, describing radically different periods and environments -- from Sherman's early experiments in Toronto in the 1970s to his recent explorations of text and image in Nova Scotia's South Shore. At the core of this volume is "The Faraday Cage," a text that delivers a vivid cascade of images of the art scene in Toronto at the onset of the video era in the early 1970s. This opening chapter expands into a series of essays in which Sherman pictures a vast horizon of contexts: urban, rural, social, political, economic, and in some cases, simply a beach along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. His ongoing and rigorous investigation into the intersections of art, technology, and life itself is grounded in the converging terrains of mediaspheres and landscapes. And then, in a quick shift of perspective enter Peggy Gale and Caroline Seck Langill, who charge the book with wide-sweeping conversations about Sherman's practice: his use of written language and dynamic, critically engaged "pictures," the expansive reach of his text-based visual works, and the distinctive character of his voice. The result is a provocative retrospective in book form that both demonstrates and expands upon Tom Sherman's clear, forward-looking vision.