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28/6/2012

Tools for Conviviality

The Power Plant, Toronto

curated by by Melanie O’Brian

The Power Plant opens a new group exhibition and celebrates with a lakeside summer opening party on Friday, 29 June 2012

The Power Plant’s Summer 2012 season opens with a group exhibition of work united by the idea of art as tools. Tools for Conviviality features artists from Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, and Vienna, some emerging and some more established, who create and engage tools to comment on how we live in this world. Participating artists include: Abbas Akhavan, Raymond Boisjoly, Geoffrey Farmer, Claire Fontaine, Kyla Mallett, Swintak/Don Miller, Reece Terris, Oscar Tuazon, Ulla von Brandenburg, and Franz West.

This exhibition features works that are interactive as well as mechanisms towards self-help, political shifts, ritual devices, defence, and critique.

Referencing the 1973 text by philosopher Ivan Illich of the same name, which sought to dismantle the specialization of industrial knowledge by elites, Tools for Conviviality seeks to develop a politic of having more individual influence in the world. The tools that most interested Illich, and are reflected in the exhibition, have links to self-organization, Wiki models, democratic space, and forms of communal activity.

Curated by Melanie O’Brian, this exhibition is on view from 30 June through 26 August 2012, and opening party is set for Friday, 29 June from 8 – 11 PM, free to the public. Many of the artists will be in attendance, so please join us on the gallery’s lakefront terrace as we continue to celebrate our 25th anniversary year.

Works by Abbas Akhavan and Claire Fontaine include homemade armaments, while Franz West’s interactive Adaptives connect viewers with their individual visual and tactile experience of objects. Geoffrey Farmer presents a project based around a half-formed figure that will be added to and changed by children over the course of the exhibition, and Ulla von Brandenburg’s engagement with stage and props results in a film installation (seen only once before) that approaches the power of ritual as a tool. Kyla Mallett’s appropriated constellation-like diagrams are pulled from a self-improvement manual, Oscar Tuazon’s sculptural work brings an industrial aesthetic to playful utopian architecture, and Reece Terris identifies a professional and personal custom of thanks and consolation. Raymond Boisjoly’s new exterior text-based work considers The Power Plant’s location within aboriginal histories and Western vernaculars, and Swintak/Don Miller’s new work grafts a piece of an experimental rural project onto the gallery.

THIS EXHIBITION IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE POWER PLAYERS PROGRAM: BMO FINANCIAL GROUP, CIBC, MANULIFE FINANCIAL, ROGERS, STONEGATE PRIVATE COUNSEL, AND TD SECURITIES

Upcoming Programs and Events
PRIMARY EDUCATION SPONSOR: CIBC

OPENING PARTY: Friday, 29 June, 8–11 PM
Be one of the first in the city to see the new exhibitions and meet many of the participating artists.
FREE admission to all and a cash bar will be available.

ARTISTS’ TOUR: Tools for Conviviality
Saturday, 30 June, 2 PM
Curator & Head of Programs Melanie O’Brian introduces this gallery tour led by participating artists Abbas Akhavan, Raymond Boisjoly and Kyla Mallett. This is a unique opportunity to meet the artists and hear about their work first-hand.

BOOK SALE: Sunday, 1 July, 2-6 PM
Join us for our annual book sale of art books and exhibition catalogues and enjoy deep discounts up to 75% off.

LIVE: Mariachi Fuego: Sunday, 1 July, 3–4 PM
We are pleased to welcome Toronto mariachi band Mariachi Fuego for a series of performances this summer. They will perform in relationship to Reece Terris’s project for Tools for Conviviality.

POWER KIDS: Geoffrey Farmer’s Figure
Sunday, 1 July, 3–5 PM
For children ages 8–12 and their younger siblings and adult companions. Through props and costumes, artist Geoffrey Farmer proposes a project that reinterprets The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the current exhibition Tools for Conviviality. Participants have the chance to activate this work by adding to and transforming a large sculptural figure over the course of the exhibition. Please call 416.973.4949 to reserve a spot.

2012 POWER KIDS SPONSOR: BMO FINANCIAL GROUP

For more information on exhibitions and all public programs, call +1.416.973.4949 or visit www.thepowerplant.org

Media Contact:
Robin Boyko
Marketing & Communications Coordinator
The Power Plant
+1.416.973.4927
rboyko@thepowerplant.org

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre
231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, ON, M5J 2G8, Canada
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Friday 12 – 6 PM
Saturday - Sunday 12 – 8 PM
Open holiday Mondays
Admission free

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