Saturday, June 7, 2025
2-5PM, followed by a reception, 5-7PM
Top Top Projects (165 Geary Ave, Toronto, ON M6H 2B8)

Roundtable A: Press
2PM
Co-presented with Art Metropole
Featuring: Vincent Bonin, Robert Fones, Peggy Gale, and Luis Jacob

Roundtable B: Space
3:30 PM
Co-presented with the plumb
Featuring: Anthony Cooper, Suzy Lake, Nell Tenhaaf, and Adam Welch

Tom Dean: GOOD-BYE is an exhibition that brings together a rarely seen body of conceptual and sculptural work produced between 1969-1974, when Dean was living in Montreal. Documenting the artist’s extensive and active engagement with the local alternative art scene and broader cultural milieu, GOOD-BYE invites viewers to reevaluate and reflect on the enduring significance of Dean’s work, and this cultural history, in today’s context.

In partnership with Art Metropole and the plumb, we are pleased to convene roundtable discussions around two essential nodes of Dean’s early practice: artist’s press and publications and artist-run spaces. Bringing together an illustrious panel of speakers, the discussions will shed light on the historical context of these movements and activities and reflect on the threads of resonance that are visible, at work, and needed in this present moment.

The event will take place at Top Top Projects (165 Geary Ave, Toronto, ON M6H 2B8) and will be followed by a reception with refreshments.

Panelists

Vincent Bonin
Vincent Bonin is an author and independent researcher. His essays and books have been published by 1700 La Poste (Montreal), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canadian Art (Toronto), Centre André Chastel (Paris), Darling Foundry (Montreal), Fillip (Vancouver), the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montréal), the MIT Press (Cambridge), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, les Presses du réel (Dijon), Sterberg Press (Berlin) and the Vancouver Art Gallery. As a curator, he organized, amongst other exhibitions, Documentary Protocols (1965-1975) (2007-2008), D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant/Actor, networks, theories (2015), both at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal, Réponse (around the philosopher Catherine Malabou) (2016), at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides in Saint-Jérôme, in 2016, and was co-curator, with Catherine Morris, of Materializing Six Years, Lucy R. Lippard and the emergence of Conceptual Art, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2012, and, with a collective of curators, of Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada (various venues, on tour from 2010 to 2013).

Anthony Cooper
Anthony Douglas Cooper is a Toronto-based artist working across sculpture and performance. He is known for his collaborations through VSVSVS and as a founding member of the plumb. Recent exhibitions include Tools ‘n’ Shit (2019) at goodwater gallery, Rabbithole Foxhole (2019) at The J Spot, Vision321 (2024) curated by Hearth Garage, at the plumb, Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole (2024) at The Goldfarb Gallery, and a colourful dotted line (2025) at Blouin Division. Cooper’s most recent curatorial projects at the plumb include the exhibition goodtime, which continued and expanded John Goodwin’s recent curatorial work, and Andrew James Paterson: Never Enough Night, co-curated with Laura Carusi and Kate Whiteway, and Luxurious Labour with Charlie Murray. 

Robert Fones
Robert Fones was born in London, Ontario on 10 March 1949. He was part of an active art scene in London associated with 20/20 Gallery, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1969. In 1973 he was a founding member of Forest City Gallery. He also designed the original tree-ring logo.

Robert Fones has lived in Toronto since 1976. He first exhibited with Carmen Lamanna Gallery, then Sandra Simpson Gallery before joining Olga Korper Gallery in 2000. In his work Fones often combines elements from popular culture and design, such as packaging, pictograms and letterforms, with his investigations into geological, cultural, and industrial history. Fones works in a variety of media and has consistently explored a number of recurring themes: the ideologies embedded in the artifacts of cultural life, the invisible span of natural and cultural change, and the visual contradictions inherent in the two-dimensional illusions of painting and photography.

Fones has exhibited in Canada, the United States and Germany. In 1999 he received the Toronto Arts Award for Visual Art. He 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 & Art History program at Sheridan College.

Artist books have featured prominently in his artistic production. He has published several books with Coach House Books and with Art Metropole including Anthropomorphiks (1971) Field Identification (1985), Head Paintings (1997) and Bevelled Paintings (2025). Fones has also written extensively about art and design for publications such as C Magazine, Parachute, Vanguard, Ciel Variable, Canadian Art, and Azure Magazine.

Peggy Gale
A Toronto-based independent curator and writer/critic specializing in media-related and time-based works by contemporary artists, Peggy Gale studied art history at the University of Toronto and Università degli Studi in Florence. Her numerous exhibitions range from Videoscape (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974-1975), to L’avenir (looking forward) for La Biennale de Montréal, 2014. She received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2006.

Gale has published widely since the mid-1970s; recent essays include “Up All Night,” in Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures fromPublic Books, Toronto, 2021, an essay for Tom Sherman’s Exclusive Memory: A Perceptual History of the Future, edited by David Diviney (2023) and a foreword for The Prophets: Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, edited by Ana Barajas, 2024.

A selection of her texts is currently in preparation for publication as ANTECEDENTS: Art After Video.

Luis Jacob
Luis Jacob was born in Lima, Peru, and now lives in Toronto, Canada.  Working as artist, curator, and writer, his diverse practice addresses power and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience.  Working as artist, curator, and writer, his diverse practice addresses power and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience.  Jacob’s work invites a collision of meaning systems that destabilize our conventions of viewing and open up possibilities for participation and the creation of knowledge.

Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, and Birch Libralato, Toronto (2012); Kunsthalle Lingen (2012); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2011); Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2010); Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009); and Kunstverein Hamburg, (2008). 

Group exhibitions include Taipei Biennial 2012, Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2012);Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2008); and Documenta 12, Kassel (2007).

Suzy Lake
Suzy Lake emigrated to Montreal from Detroit, Michigan in 1968. She is known for her large-scale photography dealing the body as both subject and device. Although classically trained, her practice adopted performance, video, and photography as an exploration into politics of the body, identity, and power relations. Lake’s later work questions these issues of resistance to include the politic and poetics of the ageing body. Suzy’s work is represented by Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal and MFC_Michele Didier in Paris, France. If in Montreal, she will have a major solo show in September at the Bradley Ertaskiran gallery.

Lake was one of 13 co-founders of Vehicule Art Inc. artist -run centre in 1971 (Tom Dean was another co-founder). The Art Gallery of Ontario presented Introducing Suzy Lake, a full career retrospective in 2014. Lake was the recipient of both a Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts and Media, and the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2016. She was awarded the Distinguished Artist Award got Lifetime Achievement in Chicago last year.                                                                                           

Her work is in the collection of major museums in Canada, plus significant international institutions such as the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA; Brandhorst Museum, Munich, Germany; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, Michigan, USA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY. USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, USA; Museum Lodz, Wroclaw, Poland; and the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, Austria.

Nell Tenhaaf
Nell Tenhaaf is an electronic media artist and writer. Born in Oshawa, she lived in Montreal from 1969 to 1994, in Pittsburgh 1994-97, and since then in Toronto and Trent Hills, Ontario.

Tenhaaf  has been working with computer-based media since the early 1980s. She first made pioneering artworks using the Telidon videotex protocol for interactive graphics and text. She then became known for lightbox displays that presented a critique and appropriation of scientific material about genetic engineering and biotechnology. Since the mid-1990s her work has been implicated in artificial life (A-life, an early relative of AI) and has taken the form of sculptures that bring human and electronic components into close contact.

Tenhaaf has exhibited her work in Canada and internationally. She is Professor Emerita at York University in Toronto, and is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Adam Welch
Prior to joining the AGO in 2023 as Curator, Modern Art, Adam held various curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His exhibitions for the NGC include the retrospective General Idea (2022), Joseph Beuys (2015–17), The Advent of Abstraction (2016–17), and the Indigenous and Canadian Galleries (2017). He holds an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD in the history of art from the University of Toronto, where he is an Assistant Professor, Status Only.

Learn more about the exhibition here.