Summer 2015 exhibitions
20 June–7 September 2015
Opening: 19 June, 8–11pm
The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto
Ontario M5J 2G8
Canada
The Power Plant presents solo exhibitions featuring commissioned projects by Bik Van der Pol, Tercerunquinto and YES! Association/Föreningen JA! Juxtaposing their respective installations is a new collaborative project by Nadia Belerique, Lili Huston Herterich and Laurie Kang.
Curated by Julia Paoli
Bik Van der Pol
Eminent Domain
The production and circulation of knowledge is an important tool in Bik Van der Pol’s practice, which is largely context-specific and driven by the possibilities of art and research. Through installation and sound, Eminent Domain continues the artists’ interest in making visible the largely unnoticed conditions or realities of a globalized economy and its effect on urban and natural spaces. Situating and mirroring the viewer amidst statistics related to ecology and species extinction, their project turns abstract data into a physical experience while examining the re-articulation of public and private property and the threat of such activities on natural environments.
Tercerunquinto
Mine
Ten years following the installation of Open Access (2005), Tercerunquinto return to The Power Plant to reflect upon changes to the site and surround of the institution. Their response reduces the gallery to a hole in the ground, a gesture of excavation that disrupts the notion of ownership and complicates one’s understanding of property as it might relate to Canada’s mining industry and relationship to indigenous populations. Passing through several varied contexts, the project prompts a series of questions inherent in discussing shifting conceptions of territory. At its core, Mine asks viewers to question their sense of possession: what does and does not belong to them.
YES! Association/Föreningen JA!
(art)work(sport)work(sex)work
YES! Association/Föreningen JA!’s project aims to map how ideologies, socially accepted norms and legislation govern the conditions of work and participation within the fields of contemporary art, multi-sports events and sex trade by specifically addressing The Power Plant, the Pan Am and Parapan Am Games, hosted in Toronto this summer, and Canada’s new sex trade law Bill C-36. In an effort to triangulate these fields and situate them within the urban space of Toronto, people and groups who work within visual art, sports culture and sex trade have been invited to host bus rides each Saturday throughout the exhibition.
The Mouth Holds the Tongue
A collaborative project by Nadia Belerique, Lili Huston-Herterich and Laurie Kang
Invited to work collectively for The Power Plant, the artists’ first group project foregrounds the pleasures inherent in representing and experiencing time and space. It points towards collaborative methodologies by privileging temporal fissures and offering temporality as a visceral means of organizing individuals non-hierarchically. The forms of collaboration implicit in this project are not found simply within the artists’ collectivity but implicate the curator, the institution, the viewer, and the space of the gallery. Aimed at redistributing forms of power, the artists’ architectural structure renders fluid the roles of all those involved in the exhibition as well as the artworks and walls that bear them. Effectively turning the gallery upside-down, this approach entangles bodies through non-sequential interactions, and in doing so, it provides opportunities for those navigating the space to connect in varying degrees of reciprocity.
Each project was commissioned by the Toronto Pan Am / Parapan Am Games Arts and Culture Festival, PANAMANIA presented by CIBC.
Support for Eminent Domain: Toronto: Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Technically Yours, Inc., and Westbury National Show Systems Ltd.
Support for Mine: AeroMexico and the Consulate General of Mexico, Toronto
Support for (art)work(sport)work(sex)work: IASPIS
Support for The Mouth Holds the Tongue: Robin Anthony, Colette Barber, Kaye Beeston, Helen Braithwaite, Sue Dalley, Eileen Farrow, Patty Fischer, Pamela Hallisey, Mary Henderson, Jane Humphreys, Jan Innes, Popsy Johnstone, Nancy Kennedy, Sue Kidd, Susie Kololian, Karen Lang, Maryella Leggat, Claire McConnell, Gisele McIsaac, Pamela Meredith, Beverley Morlock, Jeanne Parkin, Rundi Phelan, Donna Poile, Frances Price, Lena Sarkissian, Stacey Sharpe, Victoria Taylor, Samara Walbohm, Jane Zeidler and Smithers-Oasis Company
