How do artists in Toronto visualize their sense of place? Are there particular made-in-Toronto ways of thinking about the city?

Curated by internationally renowned Toronto-based artist — and current Visiting Professor at the Daniels Faculty — Luis Jacob, Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto concentrates on a period of more than fifty years to consider the ways in which artists visualize Toronto. Presenting a thematic clustering of works by eighty-six artists, the exhibition is premised on the tendency of artists in this 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 exhibition 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.

Writes Murray Whyte, visual arts critic at the Toronto Star:

Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto” is a curious indulgence in broad, inclusive — and very, very long — cultural history in a place that has typically worn its amnesia like a badge of honour. Indeed, the exhibition, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Art Museum and curated with loving care by Luis Jacob, an artist with an admirably stubborn devotion to our forward-looking hometown, offers a very different view.

 

FORM FOLLOWS FICTION: ART AND ARTISTS IN TORONTO
Curated by Luis Jacob
Art Museum at the University of Toronto
September 6 to December 10, 2016

For more information on this exhibition and related programs, visit the University of Toronto Art Centre website.

Other current and upcoming exhibitions featuring Luis Jacob's work:

Le Grand Balcon 
curated by Philippe Pirotte
La Biennale de Montréal
October 19, 2016 to January 15 January, 2017

Yonder
curated by Matthew Brower and Mona Filip
Koffler Centre of the Arts, Toronto
September 21 to November 27, 2016

Response
curated by Vincent Bonin
Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides
September 6 to November 6, 2016

Interprétations à l’oeuvre
curated by Mathilde Guyon and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre
Astérides, Marseille
August 27 to November 27, 2016