The Masters of Visual Studies Program at the University of Toronto Presents:

SOVEREIGN ACTS - AGE OF CONSENT - THE LAST THINGS BEFORE THE LAST
2012 Curatorial Studies Thesis Exhibitions

Curated by Wanda Nanibush, Talia Linz, and E.C. Woodley





SOVEREIGN ACTS @ Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
April 18 – May 27, 2012

Opening Reception: Wednesday April 18, 7-9 pm

Works by Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Robert Houle, Terrance Houle, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas

Curated by Wanda Nanibush

The history of Indigenous Peoples performing cultural dances and practices for international and colonial audiences is an important part of Indigenous art generally, and performance art specifically. The Indigenous performers known as 'Indians' faced the conundrum of maintaining traditional cultural practices by performing them on stage while also having that performance fulfill the desires of a colonial imaginary. In Sovereign Acts, the artists Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Robert Houle, Terrance Houle, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, and Jeff Thomas, contend with the legacy of colonial representations. Drawing on the depiction of the imaginary Indian – the ahistorical, pre-contact 'primitivism' in popular and mass culture – they recover and construct new ways of performing the complexity of Indigenous cultures for a contemporary art audience. Their work returns to the multi-levelled history of 'Performing Indian' to recuperate the erased and objectified performer as an ancestor, an artist, and an Indigenous subject.


AGE OF CONSENT @ Doris McCarthy Gallery
April 14 – May 12, 2012

Opening reception: Saturday April 14, 2-5 pm

Works by Sue de Beer, Wendy Coburn, Kyla Mallett, Leslie Peters, Rebecca Fin Simonetti, Tobias Yves Zintel

Curated by Talia Linz

*Free shuttle bus for the opening departs 401 Richmond Street West at 2pm, returning at 5pm

Age of Consent brings together the work of six Canadian and international artists who look at adolescence in various forms, exploring experiences (real and projected), perceptions (internal and external), myths, dreams and desires connected to this demographic and this time of life. The exhibition includes work in various mediums from video to drawing, sculpture to photography, that looks at notions of socialization and anti-socialization: play, excess, experimentation, negotiating systems of authority, self-presentation and identity. There is a focus on the phenomenon of girlhood, the cultural erasure of the teenager, and ideas around sexualization and youth as biocapital. There is also a strong emphasis on teen agency and a number of the artists included work directly with adolescent co-creators. Temporality is a central factor in considering ideas around adolescence, which is often framed as emblematic of the liminal, as a transitional phase to move through to achieve a more stable state of being. Many of the works in Age of Consent celebrate wading in the uncomfortable unknowing of teenagedom, asking how this paradigmatic period shapes the formation of the self and continues to inform adult subjectivity.


THE LAST THINGS BEFORE THE LAST @ McMaster Museum of Art
May 24 – August 4, 2012

Opening Reception: Friday June 1, 6-8pm

Works by Stephen Andrews, Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Ken Currie, Max Dean, Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Antony Gormley, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ludwig Meidner, Christiane Pflug, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, Edvard Munch, and others.

Curated by E.C. Woodley

The Last Things Before the Last resurrects fragments of two earlier exhibitions at the McMaster Museum of Art within a new configuration of works from the collection. The reconstructed elements are from artist Alexander Pilis's 2010-2011 curatorial endeavour The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt and from the 1994 installation that opened the new building of the MMA, featuring the donated collection of Herman Levy as it once hung in the Levy family home. These exhibition fragments are incorporated into a new composition with its own associational counterpoint on the theme of disappearance and reappearance. More particularly, the new configuration draws on the breadth of the time span of the MMA collections – from a Ptah-Sokar-Osiris tomb figure (1,000-500 B.C) across First World War-era pages of the Levy family photo album to Toronto artist Max Dean's self portrait Chair Without Front Legs from the 2011 series Objects Waiting. Outside the traditional format of exhibition-making that is structured around a delimited time frame, an art historical period, and/or a chronological form of presentation, this seemingly 'ahistorical' exhibition invites an excess of history.


Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
Hart House, University of Toronto
7 Hart House Circle
Toronto, ON M5S 3H3
t: 416-978-8398

Gallery Hours
Monday - Friday 12 - 5 pm
Saturday 1 - 5 pm

Doris McCarthy Gallery
University of Toronto Scarborough
1265 Military Trail
Toronto, ON M1C 1A4
t: 416-287-7007

Gallery Hours
Wednesday - Friday 10 am - 5 pm
Saturday, 12 to 5 pm

McMaster Museum of Art
Alvin A. Lee Building, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, ON L8S 4L6
t: 905-525-9140 ext.23081

Gallery Hours
Tue/Wed/Fri 11 am - 5 pm
Thursday 11 am - 7 pm
Saturday 12 - 5 pm
Closed: Sundays, Mondays