Showroom

Showroom is a survey exhibition of Toronto works that have emerged within a period of rapid urban development and concomitant transformations in representation of the city. Drawing on the showroom as a flattened ideal of living that is devoid of the nuances of difference, the exhibition considers how textures of the built environment have nevertheless asserted themselves through the works of artists living here and in ways that complicate given knowledge of architecture, place, and the social order. Where real estate rhetoric has appropriated the artist as a benign element in the landscape, Showroom reverses the figure/ground relationship in order to identify particular nodes of production amongst artists currently working in Toronto or associated with its artistic milieu. Showroom furthers our sustained institutional engagement with developing histories of Toronto art and artists and offers the most extensive survey of Toronto works within our combined history of display at the University of Toronto Art Centre/ Justina M. Barnicke Gallery.