Plant 90: of Production and Object

Curated by Persilia Caton
arts@401richmond.net

Katie Bethune-Leamen
Alex Durlak
Jen Hutton
Luis Jacob
Kate McQuillen
Ken Nicol
Olexander Wlasenko

In the early 1900s, the building that is now 401 Richmond was a factory that produced the finest lithography on tinware available in Canada. Designated as "Plant 90" in 1940, it continued as a tinware factory until production ceased in the late 1960s. Over the next 25 years the building saw a series of landlords and by 1994 it was poised for the wrecking ball, its owners bankrupt. That same year, the Zeidler family purchased the building with the vision of hosting a diverse group of tenants focused on community and the arts. 401 Richmond is now home to over 140 cultural producers and entrepreneurs and is described as “a village within a box”. Plant 90: of Production and Object references 401 Richmond’s roots as a factory that produced aesthetically beautiful utilitarian objects. The exhibition is situated in this space, in which a community is engaged in art production and presentation, in order to emphasize the self-reflexiveness of art making. In the context of the public spaces of the building, the exhibition draws parallels between the site and the role of labour, production and collectivity in the works exhibited.

JEN HUTTON

The site-specific pushpin installation created by Jen Hutton can be viewed as a metaphor for the power of collective action; an abundant collection of cheap, ordinary objects creates a text-based intervention and a public statement. Process-based, laborious and repetitive, “the temporal
nature of the pins contrast with the overall sense of monumentalism: individually, they are fleeting objects that, en masse, become a record of laboured gestures,” says Hutton.

KEN NICOL

Ken Nicol’s Flogging a Dead Horse II and III and “if a thing is worth doing once, it’s worth doing again”, inspired by minimalist Carl Andre, also employs process-based repetition. Nicol’s hatch-mark drawings and typewritten index cards quantify the labour of seemingly endless actions.

ALEX DURLAK

Alex Durlak’s Anything But uses the stencil as a reproduction technique to create a text-based installation. This grid-like piece repeats the three letters composing the word “art.” Sharing Nicol’s methodically plotted intellectual playfulness, Durlak avoids spelling out the very thing he is creating.

KATIE BETHUNE-LEAMEN

Katie Bethune-Leamen’s self-referential piece A 1:16 Scale Model of ”The Temporary Katie Centre for Katie’s Art” Sitting on the Stacked Volumes of ”A Month of Sundays: Alterity and Transcendence—Collected Essays” and a Plinth is a complete record of the artist’s writing in the two years following the completion of her MFA degree. Accompanying the three-volume collection is a scale model of a previous work from 1997 wherein Bethune-Leamen brought a mobile office trailer unit into the gallery in which people were invited to produce art for the artist. Functioning in a similar fashion to 401 Richmond, her diminutive self-titled art centre highlights the worker as artist and celebrates the space in which objects are produced and displayed.

OLEXANDER WLASENKO

Olexander Wlasenko’s large-scale photo-realistic drawing Factory illustrates blue-collar workers grouped together and engaged in a collective endeavour. This depiction provides an identity for the often-unseen labourer, and presents these individuals as empowered through their physical abilities and output. Wlasenko’s drawings evoke a reverence for their subjects in the detailed manner of their portrayal, and in the labour intensive process of their creation.

KATE MCQUILLEN

Kate McQuillen’s site-specific paper sculptures recreate the communication system used at the turn of the century in Plant 90. Megaphones harken back to a time when the dissemination of information and calls to action were piped through the building. Placed in the hallways, her
representation of 19th century communication technology connotes ideas of collectivity and the relationship between communication and production.

LUIS JACOB

Luis Jacob’s installation of 30 taxidermied pigeons, From Stream to Golden Stream, draws parallels between certain characteristics of pigeons (for instance their homing skills, their sense of location and group formation) and traits in artist networks. Jacob’s depiction of the active flock is presented as homage to “the idea of artist-initiated culture and the dream of free collective production and exchange,” according to the artist. Situated inside 401 Richmond, his birds symbolize the vibrancy and activity found within artist communities.

STANDARD FORM PRINTING AND PUBLISHING

Integral to the inspiration of this exhibition is the printing press and limited-edition factory production, thus the involvement of Standard Form Printing and Publishing in the creation of the exhibition brochure. In the brochure, seven do-it-yourself stencils represent each artist’s work in
the exhibition. Participants can use these stencils to extend the exhibition’s concepts of repetition and reproduction into their own declaration of production.

You can pick up a printed brochure at 401 Richmond St. W.

ARTIST BIOS
Katie Bethune-Leamen
is a visual artist, writer and sometimes curator based in Toronto. She received her MFA from the University of Guelph, and BFA from Concordia University. Recent projects include a 20’ tall Amanita muscaria mushroom sculpture, Mushroom Studio, commissioned by the Toronto Sculpture Garden that the artist used as a functioning studio space for the year of its installation; she is currently preparing the commissioned project Dirge for Dead Slang for Toronto’s 2009 Nuit Blanche. Recent residencies include Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? led by Jan Verwoert at the Banff Centre, Reverse Pedagogy II, Venice, IT, Reverse Pedagogy III, The Model, Sligo, IE, and I_Wanna_See_You, YYZ, Toronto & de Overslag, Eidhoven, NL. The artist has an upcoming solo exhibition at MKG127, Toronto in spring, 2010.

Alex Durlak
is a Toronto based artist and musician, best known for his contributions to the music community spanning over a decade. His parallel artistic practice strongly focuses on the graphic arts, including typography, printmaking and book design. An interest in text based works, the history of the arts in Canada, and institutional representation are prevalent in his practice. Durlak is also the proprietor of Standard Form Printing and Publishing, a young press interested in working with and on the behalf of the vanguard in Canada’s flourishing art scene.

Jen Hutton
is a Toronto-based artist and writer. She holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph. This autumn, she will be showing new work at Access Gallery in Vancouver, and preparing a
commissioned installation for Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.

Luis Jacob
is an artist living in Toronto, Canada. Recent exhibitions include: “Images Recalled – Bilder auf Abruf” 3.Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen (Germany); 7 Pictures of Nothing Repeated Four Times, in Gratitude, at Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach, Germany); New Entries!, Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Bolzano, Italy); If We Can’t Get It Together: Artists Rethinking the (Mal)Function of Communities, The Power Plant (Toronto, Canada); The Order of Things, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (Antwerp, Belgium); Martian Museum of Terrestial Art, Barbican Art Gallery (London, UK); documenta12 (Kassel, Germany); and Luis Jacob: Habitat, Kunstverein in Hamburg (Hamburg, Germany). Opening in March 2010, he will participate in the exhibition
Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, at the Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA). Luis Jacob is represented by Birch Libralato, Toronto.

Kate McQuillen
is a Chicago-based artist working mainly in print and installation. Her work deals with telecommunications as an invisible landscape in our midst, and the relationship of this idea
to American ideals of technology. McQuillen received an MFA in Visual Art from York University in 2009. She has exhibited works in Toronto, Montréal, Boston, and Chicago.

Ken Nicol
studied at several institutions before giving up on any kind of diploma. He currently works in a studio in Toronto where he surrounds himself with old typewriters, clocks and broken things. He makes art. Nicol is represented by MKG127, Toronto.

Olexander Wlasenko
graduated with distinction from the Ontario College of Art and Design and received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Guelph and a Master of Fine Art from The University of Western
Ontario. Wlasenko has received numerous Toronto and Ontario Arts Council grants and awards of distinction including the Best Drawing Award at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. Wlasenko
has exhibited extensively in Toronto, nationally in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Dawson City, Yukon, and internationally in Florence, Italy and Kyiv, Ukraine. He is currently the Curator
at Station Gallery in Whitby, Ontario.