Opening Reception: Saturday, February 1, 2020, 2PM – 4PM

Jason McLean’s expansive and energetic practice spans works on paper, sculpture, mail art, performance, found audio compilations, hand-sewn costumes, and scavenged collections of everyday objects. Best known for his diaristic drawings, which trace the contours of his life through self-reflexive mapping and word play, he charts the world around him with a sense of humour and whimsy, while also deftly capturing the anxiety and precarity of the present moment. As writer Matthew Ryan Smith notes, he is, “a mapper of memory, a cartographer of the everyday, an archivist of minutiae, a chronicler of the prosaic.” Which is to say that McLean’s practice is world making. In his drawings, the surrealist roads and buildings loosely reference the towns and cities he has lived in and are marked with locations of celebrity sightings or important sporting events from his youth, and contain ruminations on everything from real estate speculation to the state of his career. There is an infectious energy and peculiar logic to the ways things are pulled together, reconstituted and presented again. A small sample of Pez dispensers from the now infamous “Felix and Henry’s Pez Museum” (a project started with his sons in 2012), as well as collections of cereal boxes and candy wrappers, are presented in the gallery alongside the drawings showing both his obsessive interest in material culture and also an irreverence for what is considered “important” art.

If you see me, say hello, a reference to a Bob Dylan song by the same name, marks a moment of looking back from the vantage point of the mid-career mark in the artist’s practice. Bringing together works from the last twenty years, the exhibition draws on emergent themes: critical regionalism, collaborative production, collected ephemera, and an intense preoccupation with the cult of celebrity. While at times deeply personal and confessional, the works point to larger societal questions that chart the uncertainty of our time, sharing insights on the parts of life that cause anxiety and also the parts that bring the most joy.

Jason McLean was born in London, ON in 1971. After attending H.B. Beal Secondary School, McLean graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver in 1997. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including shows at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Loyal Gallery in Malmo Sweden, Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Franklin Parrish Gallery, and Zieher Smith Gallery in New York City. He has work in major collections throughout North America including the Museum of Modern Art, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Bank of Montreal Collection, and the Royal Bank of Canada. McLean is represented by Michael Gibson Gallery in London, ON, Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Mónica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, BC, and Van Der Plas Gallery, New York, NY.

Learn more about Felix and Henry’s Pez Museum here. 

Jason McLean: If you see me, say hello

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 1, 2020 2PM – 4PM

With a Performance by Basil AlZeri:

everyone under the sun
Basil AlZeri

“The sun opens the floorboards to light, the light shafts gradually towards her ankle, moves up her body like a brush, feathery. She watches herself in half light, half dark, and it is this preoccupation with herself that makes someone stop at the window. Though it is not seduction, but a genuine fascination with the sun creeping up her ankle.”

–Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon

Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold is a contemporary exploration of the sun, as an activator of sensory engagement, provoking deeper contemplations on sensuality, eroticism, pleasure, and politics of desire. Inspired by Dionne Brand’s descriptions of her young protagonist Maya and her awakening self-awareness, the selected works by Kapwani Kiwanga, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Rajni Perera, draw attention to a multilayered sensory ecology that weaves together embodiment, space, and the radiance of the sun. Mundane, yet seducing moments such as the warmth of soaking in the soft ambient morning light or relishing in the golden hues of the magic hour can spark meditations on a specific being-ness that is responsive to the present moment—a quiet unfolding of bodily and spiritual presence. In this exhibition context, the sun is a catalyst providing a language that infuses wonder and awe into the amplitudes of Black and Brown inner lives, substituting oppressive imaginaries for consuming fantasies. Contemporary poets such as Rupi Kaur, Upile Chisala, and Nayyirah Waheed compare the spectrum of melanin’s luminescence to luxurious and sun-like materials such as honey, gold, and marigold. By employing these qualifiers as an affirmation of inner and outer radiance, it also addresses a strong desire to assert a bodily embrace that is expansive while reclaiming melanated people’s cosmic relationship to the sun.

Basil AlZeri is a cross-disciplinary visual artist living and working between Toronto and Guelph, Canada. Basil’s practice involves the intersection of art, education, and food, taking multiple forms, such as performance, interventions, gallery and public installation. Basil examines the socio-political dynamics of the family and its intersection with reproductive/unproductive labour, drawing on the necessities of everyday life and the (in)visibility of ‘work’ as sites of exploration. Basil tries to facilitate a space for empathy through gestures of inclusivity and generosity. Basil presented his work in Amman, Dubai, Halifax, Mexico City, Montreal, New York, Ottawa, Regina, Rome, Santiago, Tartu And Toronto.

Born in Ontario to Tanzanian parents, Kapwani Kiwanga lives and works in Paris. She studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, completed the “La Seine” program at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and has worked at the Centre national d’art contemporain Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France. She was artist in residence at the MU Foundation in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and at La Box in Bourges, France. Her works have been exhibited by world-class institutions such as the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris), Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel, France), London South Gallery (London), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Logan Art Center (Chicago), Power Plant (Toronto), Esker Foundation (Calgary), and Glasgow International (Glasgow). In 2018, Kiwanga was the winner of the Frieze Artist Award and the Sobey Art Award.

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian visual artist. An economist by training and a policy analyst by profession, her visual arts practice aims to engage viewers on issues both personal and structural in ways that bring awareness to their own complicity. Her work has been exhibited at AXENEO7, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Place des Arts, the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Nia Centre, Studio Sixty Six, Z-Art Space, Station 16, and the Mohr Gallery in Mountain View, California,. She has given presentations on her artistic practice and research at universities across Quebec, including Laval, McGill and Concordia, and has facilitated workshops at the National Gallery of Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and Redwood City High School in California. She is currently based in Ottawa.

Rajni Perera was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 and lives and works in Toronto. She explores issues of hybridity, sacrilege, irreverence, the indexical sciences, ethnography, gender, sexuality, popular culture, deities, monsters and dream worlds. All of these themes marry in a newly objectified realm of mythical symbioses. They are flattened on the medium and made to act as a personal record of impossible discoveries. In her work she seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of these icons, both scripturally existent, self-invented and externally defined. She creates a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force through which people can move outdated, repressive modes of being towards reclaiming their power.

Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer interested in issues of ethnocultural representational spaces in Canada. Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogue, and alternative BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) futurities and healing. Her current research focus is on the notion of longevity as radical resistance. Wallen is an Exhibition Coordinator at the FOFA Gallery. She is also a curator/board member at Younger than Beyoncé Gallery and a member of the ad-hoc collective We Critique, We Curate.

Further Reading

Read Online

Literature included in this exhibition:

Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 5 2PM – 4PM

Coming to the opening reception from Toronto? We have organized a bus to bring you to and from the opening! Pick up: in front of OCADU at 1:00PM at 100 McCaul Street and will return to OCADU for 4:30. To reserve a spot on the bus: RSVP to [email protected].

For over 40 years, artists Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge have been creating urgent and insightful work that challenges the status quo and brings to light the important issues facing our time. With unwavering attention and unapologetic political analysis, Condé + Beveridge’s work continues to explore the social and environmental impacts of globalization, racial inequality, class struggle, gendered labour divisions, precarity, and the complex struggles of consensus building. In tandem to this practice, they have worked collaboratively with union members and fellow artists, bringing the labour movement and art world into dialogue and in doing so, have transformed them both.

This exhibition presents the photo series Oshawa: A History of Local 222 (1982-83), a comprehensive body of work that traces the history of the autoworkers union in Oshawa from its formation in 1937 through to the mid-1980s. To produce the work, Condé + Beveridge spent two years interviewing and working with members of the Local 222 Retirees Committee. The resulting work, uses intricately staged tableaux to narrate the workers struggle from the perspective of women working in the plant and highlights gender-specific inequalities, including the fight for married women to be able to work and the inclusion of women in the union.

Looking back over the past 35 years since this series was made, we can see the reversal of many hard-won rights, the slow erosion of jobs and the waning strength of the union. With the threat of General Motors of Canada closing the Oshawa plant in January 2020, Condé + Beveridge have returned to work with members of the Local to create a final image in the series. The large-scale photomural pictures members of the union leadership confronting corporate executives and politicians as they stage a burial for the jobs that will be lost at the plant. Working collaboratively with current members of the union, the piece opens up new possibilities for cooperation, solidarity and artistic production, blurring the distinction between art and work, and aesthetics and politics.

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge
Canadian artists Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge moved to New York City in 1969, and soon were at the centre of the burgeoning conceptual art movement. In 1975, they joined the Art & Language journal The Fox (with Joseph Kosuth and Ian Burn) and picketed the Whitney Museum of Art to protest its lack of inclusion of women artists and artists of colour, while critiquing the apolitical minimalism of Donald Judd. This ferment culminated in a major museum show, It’s Still Privileged Art, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1976, just prior to the artists’ return to Toronto in1977.
By the late 1970s, Condé and Beveridge drew a focus on various issues that were urgent within the trade union movement. Their method of working dialogically with their subjects was invented for the landmark 1981 project Standing Up, and has been refined in numerous subsequent collaborations. In the past three decades, over fifty solo exhibitions of Condé and Beveridge’s work have been presented at major museums and art spaces on four continents, including: the Institute of Contemporary Art (London, UK); Museum Folkswang (Germany); George Meany Centre (Washington); Dazibao Gallery (Montreal); Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires); Art Gallery of Edmonton; and the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney).
Equally, and congruent with the artists’ commitment to accessibility, their work has been displayed in a host of non-art and public settings, such as union halls, billboards, bus shelters and bookworks. The artists continue to work and live in Toronto.

The RMG is wheelchair accessible and manual wheelchairs are available. Large Print, Tactile Tours & Audio Description are also available upon request. Service animals may accompany visitors at any time.

This exhibition includes work that can be touched, and ASL interpretation at the opening reception.

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 5, 2PM – 4PM

Body language is comprised of all that is not said during a conversation. It is the intangible and subjective understanding of the expressions, gestures, intonations, temperaments, spatial configurations and feelings during an encounter with another that allow us to make sense of the experience. In much the same way, the works in this exhibition are about an intuitive understanding of another person’s experience and a desire for connection that exceeds the limits of language. Working collaboratively, Oshawa-based illustrator and artist Dani Crosby and London-based multi-media artist David Bobier each produced a new body of work that responds to personal stories of Durham residents.

Collected anonymously through an online survey, participants were prompted with questions intended to inspire personal reflection such as: “What challenges you most on a daily basis?” and “When you first meet people, what do you wish they understood about you that is not immediately noticeable?” The artists then selected twelve stories from the diverse group of participants to translate and represent in different ways through their work.

For Crosby, understanding and visually interpreting these stories of struggle is an important way to build connection and resilience. For each of the twelve selected participants she has created larger-than-life illustrated portraits that capture elements of their stories through vibrant and evocative visual iconography. In one portrait, a female figure is presented with an anvil on her protruding tongue, which curls into knots. Various elements appear almost psychedelic: an open book reveals a passageway lined with bricks and a witch hat sits on top of a poisonous mushroom. Beside them, a swaddled infant is resting against an anthill and a series of ghoulish figures climb up her knee. Although the imagery may not directly represent the stories collected, it clearly articulates the urgency of the emotions and the sensitivity Crosby brings to them.

Bobier’s practice is similarly invested in forging new ways to build connection and understanding. Developing and integrating what he describes as “inclusive technologies,” his interactive sculptural works use multi-sensory experiences to share ideas. To create the sculptures, Bobier began with a line of text or element that stuck out to him from the collected stories, which he would then translate into different forms. In the work vibro-projector, a modified film projector and music box are mounted on top of an antique wooden school desk. Through turning the handle of the music box, a score in braille transcript is converted into vibration and sound as well as dancing visuals from the shadows cast on the wall. Here, the transformation of language from one modality to another opens up new possibilities for communicating in more inclusive and holistic ways, and where one method of understanding is not privileged above another.

Together the works reframe personal stories into sensuous and participatory experiences, allowing for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the challenges and desires that exist just below the surface.

David Bobier is a self-identified hard of hearing and disabled media artist and is the parent of 2 deaf children. His work has been exhibited internationally and has been the focus of prominent touring exhibitions in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. Bobier has received numerous grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Grand NCE, Ontario Arts Council and New Brunswick Arts Council.
Using performance and interactive installation Bobier explores the bridging of methods of communication and language and ways of interpreting or transforming one modality to another. His work is engaged in a multi-sensory approach and experimentation that allows for the transitioning and re-interpreting of content and experience from one medium to another with particular emphasis on the tactile as a form of creative expression. He is the Director of VibraFusionLab in Thorndale, Ontario

Dani Crosby is an artist, commercial illustrator, arts educator and community collaborator based in Oshawa. Art has become many things for Dani. It has become a service she offers, an experience to share in academic settings. But before any of these things it serves as a place to put the parts of herself that had nowhere else to go. Dani recognizes how lucky she is to have this outlet. That is why many of her favourite projects involve working collaboratively with the public to help individuals find a place to put their stories, express their identity and share their experiences.