Joe Lima: Heaven and Earth

I lived in the country once. There it seemed during the cold winter nights, the night skies had the ability to uncannily change, to transform themselves at once from awe-inspiring to suddenly terrifying. The night sky could invert itself; its infinite space of possibility could begin to seem an oppressive weight. The constellations and galaxies and unending darkness – those million points of light – could somehow change and begin to feel like a million nerve endings. When the cold quiet stillness of the winter nights becomes an oppressive silence, and in the summer, when the hum of the cicadas becomes a deafening roar, then for many it is time to leave, and the promise of life begins beyond the boundaries of what is known.

The recurring story of departures, of more perfect worlds left behind, of the inexorable tug of the new and the unknown, and of a longing for home, is as old as the story of the Garden of Eden. The movement and change in our lives distracts us and entertains us but also leaves us with a sense that our lives are provisional, improvised and lacking in connection and rootedness. This dysphoria may be a characteristic of the modernist age, where rootlessness and dislocation are a common condition.

Joe Lima’s work is informed by the anxiety of dislocation. He speaks of his desire to articulate in a traditional method a contemporary experience of the world – a “contemporary uneasiness.” His characteristic images of isolated figures in great spaces remind me of the morphology of night skies, whose vast emptiness often turns to a spectre of impending suffocation.

The Azores has been a place of departures for centuries. It is the place of origin for a diaspora of emigrants to Canada, the United States and Brazil. For Lima, born on the island of São Miguel, but raised in the southwestern Ontario community of Woodstock, the Azores was a magical place, the source of his mother’s stories both folkloric and true. His mother’s stories made a great impression on him. As a painter and graphic artist, Lima took over the role of storyteller from his mother. His frescos, oil paintings and woodcuts, are influenced by her stories and his series of fresco portraits are based on characters from the Azores. His work today continues to draw on those characters from religious parades and festivals.

Lima’s process of art making begins with his collection of photographic and video images. From these images he creates collages, which then begins a process of distancing and abstracting. First he photographs the collages and then draws the rephotographed image on the wood. Separating himself further from the original image he draws only the white areas of the photographed collage. Carving out the light areas, the negative spaces, he further removes himself from the image. The drawing and the hand carving is carried in the wood block, communicating the physical process of the image’s creation. He then inks the board. There is often no printing. For Lima, the woodblock alone can be the work, permitting the viewer to share in the manual process of the image’s making. Printing for Lima can be anticlimactic.

When I imagine the Azores, I think of a cluster of small islands sprinkled amongst the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and I imagine how the experience of the ocean enveloping the archipelago would shape my life. The heavens, when seen from the Azores, must feel like a celestial reflection – as though each verdant island was a star in the Atlantic Ocean. When I see Joe Lima’s figures, I see them living under that same celestial dome, alternatingly awe-inspiring and terrible. In these paintings and wood engravings, everyday is a titanic struggle of earth and sky.

Gordon Hatt, 2013

NetherMind

NetherMind's four exhibitions between 1991 and 1995 took place during hard times. The economy was terrible in those years. Friends lost their jobs. Some lost their homes. Just two years after the burst of optimism that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War had been declared. During the winter of 1991 I watched, on my little black and white TV, the nightly images of guided missiles hitting their targets. In the southern hemisphere a hole in the ozone layer was reported to be growing ever larger. Daily there were reminders that there seemed to be no end in sight to the AIDS epidemic.

Visual Art, what I had studied, began to have no taste in my mouth. I was distracted, bored, my attention began to drift as I searched for something more emotionally resonant. Critical theory, which had at one time seemed to explain so much about art, began to explain nothing at all. For a time I was consumed by opera, its artifice being an escape from an unpleasant reality, its high emotional register and stories of tragically wasted youth beginning to make sense to me for the first time. I wanted to feel something and it did the trick.

In 1993 I saw my first NetherMind exhibition. I remember the entrance down the narrow old staircase to the basement of the Liberty Street building, the low lighting, the warren of connecting rooms and the trepidation followed by surprise around each dark corner. Today with site-specific extravaganzas like Nuit Blanche it's easy to forget how much artists and audiences used to rely on the convention of the empty white gallery space as a frame for artwork. When one stepped across the threshold into the white space, one's senses became heightened and the entire visible field was understood as meaningful. But the “white cubes” also began to signify sterility, preciousness and a predictable convention. NetherMind made no effort to emulate the cube or “tart up” the rough, warehouse basement with a coat of paint. They embraced the gloom.

Some would call it making a virtue out of a necessity, and it was that too. Nobody was opening a new commercial gallery in Toronto in those days and the major contemporary art galleries – Isaacs, Carmen Lamanna and S.L. Simpson – galleries that had historically supported new art in Toronto, were closing or thinking about it. For artists relatively fresh out of school it was pretty much a question of do-it-yourself: form an artists' collective, rent a space, install a show and print the invitations.

Canadian art of the 1990s was dominated by artist collectives. Artists gathered into groups loosely defined by the art schools they had attended or their perceived shared interests. In 1990 Lyla Rye and John Dickson, both recent graduates of the York University Fine Art program, began to talk about forming a collective. Among those that they invited to participate was fellow York alumnus Max (Larry) Streicher. They invited Tom Dean and Reinhard Reitzenstein, established artists, who been active and exhibiting work since the 1970s. Other core members of the 1989/90 graduating cohort were Greg Hefford (joined 1992) and Mary Catherine Newcomb (joined 1993) from York, and Catherine Heard, from the Ontario College of Art and Design (joined 1993).1

What united these artists was a sculptural sensibility that engaged the emotions. The art in NetherMind exhibitions had punch – you felt it directly, in the pit of your stomach. There developed a carnival sideshow character to the exhibitions, as though the viewers were being invited to step up and explore their own morbid curiosities, their fears, their secret delights. These exhibitions caused sensations – they were sensations. They caused me to feel things and to reflect on my own reactions. What did I feel? Why did I feel this? Why did I react this way?

The NetherMind exhibitions and the subsequent careers of the members of the collective changed my expectations of what an exhibition of art could or should be. They helped me make it through a dark patch. I can't imagine Canadian art without them.

Gordon Hatt, 2012

Image: Foreground: Mary Catherine Newcomb, Osiris' Advance (10,000 Soldiers), wheat.wood, string, Background: Max Streicher and Garnet Willis, Tree Organ, tyvek, fan, computer keyboard, in NetherMind: Mirabilia (things that cause us to wonder), St. Anne's Church, Toronto, October 14 - 20, 2012. 



1. Other artists exhibiting with NetherMind were Miki McCarty (1991-93), Carl Skelton (1993), Anastasia Tzekas (1991-92), Manrico Venere (1991).

Janusz Dukszta: Portrait of a Patron

Janusz Dukszta’s home is a small one-bedroom, book and art-filled apartment on Toronto’s Park Road. The floors of the apartment are carpeted with a patchwork of haphazardly overlapping rugs that form a thickly rumpled surface underfoot. The many bookcases have been adapted to serve as the support for a complex installation of framed works of art that are variously hinged or slide mounted or simply wire-hung on a nail. Despite the sheer number of books and art work, floor length north facing windows and mirrors in the living room and dining room make the apartment feel sun-lit and bright and larger than it really is. The vibrancy of the colours and layering of the texts, both imagistic and literary, produce a mildly intoxicating effect. One’s eye is constantly tempted to dart from a colour in a painting to the bloom of a flower, from a patch of fabric on a cushion to the title on the spine of a book.

His apartment is a shrine to his life and passions. A psychiatrist by profession, a politician by vocation, and a connoisseur and a collector by compulsion, the books and art work that surround him testify to a socially engaged personality and an adventurous intellect. His art collection features little that is abstract, impressionistic or conceptual, reflecting instead his interests in people and places. Of the hundreds of works of art collected by Dukszta over the years, there are 70 group and solo portraits depicting him by himself or with family and friends. Beginning with an early conté sketch from 1953 by Olaf von Brinkenhoff, through to Goran Petkovski’s 2007 photographic documentation of his convalescent physiotherapy sessions, Dukszta commissioned some 55 portraits of himself. As a group, the commissioned portraits describe a life, from student to young professional, to middle-aged politician, to maturity. These solo and group portraits are the subject of this exhibition.

* * *

The formal portrait is associated with power and prestige and mostly, it forms our visual understanding of history’s influential people. The portraits of the men, women and children of the past are studied in their roles as princes, politicians, merchants and scholars and engaged as models of manners and self-awareness. We look to these images of our notable forbearers for evidence of a kinship to distant relatives with familiar human characteristics and their curious and exotic fashions. But in the age of democracy and electronic media, a painted portrait has come to seem something of an anachronism. A portrait painting now, rather than communicating power and authority, is more often than not commissioned on the occasion of a retirement or a leaving, to celebrate the more socially acceptable virtues of sacrifice, service, orderly transition and institutional continuity.

Photography played a role in supplanting the official portrait, and also spawned its own uniquely popular traditions of portraiture. Photography made it possible for people of average means to have wedding pictures, military portraits and even death portraits made as tokens of affection and as signifiers of family and clan relations. Few homes today are absent the requisite confirmation, graduation and formal athletic portraits that trace family ties and milestones. The photographic portrait was also the basis for a whole new industry created in the service of the identification and the tracking of individuals. Photographic portraits were early on adopted as a tool of political and social control for use in police records and passports. The methodical cataloguing of “mug shots” reducing the subject to the sum of racial characteristics and physiognomic variations, is now a humiliation experienced by everyone who wishes to obtain a driver’s license, bus pass, health insurance card or a job in a department store.

While the painted portrait was gradually ceding its official status to the photographic portrait, an avant-gardist or anti-academic portraiture began to emerge in its place. Emphasizing the thematic or formal aspects of an art work over likeness and character representation, the modern artist depicted colleagues and contemporaries not as individuals of destiny, but rather as contingent, fragile and ineffable subjects in time and space. Such portraits often held tenuous connections with natural appearances, increasingly submerging the subject beneath dense layers of surface references and abstraction. The inverse of the portrait produced in the context of a bourgeois class relationship, the modernist portrait traced a shared subjectivity between the artist and sitter.

Beyond personal vanity, sentimental attachment, functional identification or formal abstraction, portraits, whether painted, photographed or sculpted, still hold out the promise of something more. A portrait can puncture the presence of pride and appear to touch real human emotion. Portraits have the ability to reveal the light of consciousness that the viewer shares with the subject and in so doing probe the shared experience of subjectivity. Countenance and bearing, the quality of the gaze, skin colour and other marks of youth and maturity and aging speak to us about the engaged subject and the complex of passion and intellect, memory and intention, physical vigour and frailty that characterizes the human experience. 

* * *

To a certain extent, the Dukszta collection visits all of the varieties of modern portraiture. As a patron, the default position for a commission is the bourgeois or aristocratic portrait – a dominant/submissive and inherently unequal relationship where the artist hopes to earn money by pleasing a patron. If there are layers of conscious and unconscious motivation underlying a private portrait commission, certainly the pleasure in having someone else perform such a luxury would be one of them. Yet the commissioned portraits suggest a more complex ongoing ironic and reflective stance vis-à-vis the traditional patron/artist relationship.

An early portrait by Paul Young from 1964 called Thalidomide features Dukszta dressed in a suit and tie on a solid yellow ground. Dukszta is depicted as if both of his arms had been amputated at his shoulders. This visual amputation is underscored by his apparently awkward backward tilt, as if he had been seated on a couch during the drafting of the image, which had been later removed in the final painting. The effect of removing the arms and the supporting seat and backrest makes Dukszta appear floating, handicapped and defenseless. Clearly this is a portrait that does not flatter the subject by making him feel more powerful or important, but rather seeks to illustrate the subject’s vulnerability and fragility. 

A second portrait by Young entitled “Van Dyck” (1965) executed in the following year features Dukszta this time with all his limbs. In contrast to Young’s first painting, Dukszta is depicted as svelte, self-confident and self-conscious – his right hand casually in his pocket, the left leaning on what appears to be a plinth. The portrait consciously recalls the full-length dual portrait of John Stuart and his brother, Bernard Stuart by 17^th century portraitist Anthony Van Dyck. In the Van Dyck portrait, the handsome young princes are clearly masters of their domain, proudly displaying their silk sleeves and capes with their arms prominently akimbo. The Paul Young portrait makes reference to this ostentatious display by giving Dukszta’s right arm a red and green striped sleeve. Additionally, where he rests his left elbow on the support to his left, there appears a skull, and above the skull, the head of a dark-skinned, hairless and apparently tormented soul. Above this head is a third bust – a reiteration of the original portrait drawing of Dukszta. Behind the standing Dukszta and to his left is a full-length figure in profile – a spectre of melancholy and old age.

Paul Young’s full-length portrait of the handsome young man haunted by melancholy and the awareness of death is in the tradition of the memento mori. Young had approached Dukszta as an artist in search of a stimulating subject (and sale). While making reference to the bourgeois or aristocratic portrait, the painting is the artist’s free interpretation of his subject’s character. Dukszta attempted to influence the development of the portrait but met the resistance of an artist with a strong vision. In placing the silhouette of a gun behind the head of the Dukszta, the artist declared, “Of course you are going to kill yourself one day. There is no question in my mind.” Indeed, in this portrait a role reversal is in effect where the analyst has allowed himself to be the analyzed.

It is difficult to say when Dukszta got the bug – his subsequent history of commissions is marked by the close relationships he formed with a select group of artists who responded to his intellectual curiosity and adventurousness. He made the persona, and specifically his persona, a problematic subject to be explored through successive portraits and figurative allegories and he succeeded in making it the artist’s subject as well. In the early 1970's Dukszta was introduced to Phil Richards, at that time still a student at the Ontario College of Art. Dukszta had been introduced to Richards through friends who had discovered the artist in the annual art exhibition and sale in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto. The two discovered that they shared a mutual admiration for the Italian Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca and formed a friendship that was the basis for many commissions over the next 30 years.

Richards’s first portrait of Dukszta was the drawing “Janusz as Byron” (1971). The portrait shows Dukszta with the long hair, sideburns and handlebar moustache characteristic of the early seventies. The profile pose recalls the dashing, over the cape sideways glance, characteristic of the Romantic period and especially those portraits of Lord Byron. The reference to Byron, the famous aristocrat, poet, lover and adventurer goes beyond the pose, however. That Dukszta and Richards would both see Dukszta as a dashing “homme engagé” like Byron, in the year that Dukszta is first elected to the Ontario Legislature, is not surprising. And like the feminized images of Byron, Richards gives Dukszta a coiffed and swept hair, long eye lashes and an attenuated and elongated form to focus the viewer’s attention not only on the dynamism of the personality but also on the beauty and delicacy of the features.

Richard’s portraits of the 1970s depict Dukszta in a variety of guises and postures, painted in a style characteristic of 70s figurative acrylic painting. Absent the surface blending and scumbling of Paul Young’s oil portraits in the 60s, the acrylic portraits have harder edges and broader areas of saturated flat colour. In this respect, Richard’s paintings of the 70s have an illustrational character that recall the British artist David Hockney or Canadian artist Charles Pachter. In these paintings Dukszta is variously depicted as lounging casually in the nude (“Naked One,” 1973), in a jacket and tie standing in front of a Roman style mosaic (“Ambivalences - Dionysus and Apollo,” 1977), or sitting cross legged and curiously diminished in an open collar shirt (“Janusz in his office,” 1977). Relaxed and comfortable in his own skin, Dukszta again invited the artist to reverse the tables and become the analyst in portraying him as the romantic adventurer, the laid back hipster, the conflicted bourgeois and as the vulnerable analyst.

It is interesting to contrast the Richards’s portraits from the 70's with the silver gelatin photographic portrait “Janusz in a Thoughtful Mood,” by Jim Vacola (1997), which employs some of the conventions of modern photographic portraiture: the causal posture with the back of the right hand distractedly resting in the chin seems a so much more conservative image – or at least an image created in the service of acceptable contemporary electoral politics. The Vacola portrait tells us that the subject is relatively young and modern, unpretentious, serious and thoughtful man – but little more.

The end of Dukszta’s political career in 1981 coincided in Toronto with the emergence of a new generation of artists. Loosely gathered under the international banner of Neo-Expressionism, it was a generational response to the reductivist, formalist and academic aesthetics of the post-war generation of artists and critics. Neo-Expressionism represented a return to portraying the human body and the recognizable world, influenced in measure by the example of the German Expressionists of the first decade of the 20^th century. This renewed interest in representation helped to refocus interest on the work of earlier figurative artists, as well as opening the way for the consideration of outsider art, non western art and other non academic traditions. In Toronto, this movement was given form primarily through the group of artists who called themselves ChromaZone. Formed in 1981 by figurative painters Rae Johnson, H.P. Marti, Andy Fabo, Oliver Girling, Sybil Goldstein, Tony Wilson and Stephen Niblock, ChromaZone energized and influenced the Toronto and Canadian art world for the following decade.

The sudden proliferation of figurative artists in the early 1980s was an opportunity for Dukszta to engage not only with a new generation of painters, but also to work with painters who were prepared to consider the contemporary possibilities within the genre of the portrait commission. Dukszta commissioned paintings and portraits by several of the artists associated with ChromaZone including Steven Andrews, Cathy Daley, Andy Fabo, Oliver Girling, Michael Merrill, Evan Penny, Rae Johnson and Tony Wilson. Dukszta was introduced to the members of the group of artists initially through Herb Tookey, co-owner of the Cameron House hotel and tavern, which became both a home and meeting place for many of the new generation of artists. There Dukszta met the ChromaZone artist Rae Johnson whose controversial work at the time was on exhibit on the tavern’s walls. Dukszta responded to the psychosexual themes being explored by Johnson and bought a triptych from the show. His support for the young artists was moral and financial – both buying their work and inviting them to his dinner salons to dine with his progressive friends and colleagues in politics, media and the arts.

Dukszta’s withdrawal from politics and the return of figurative painting may have been a happy alignment of the stars. Less than 12 years after having arrived as an immigrant to Canada he had achieved the distinction of being an elected member of the Ontario Legislature. The end of his political career marked his return to private life as a psychiatrist and to the possibilities of a less restrictive personal lifestyle. With the new generation of artists he was able to explore issues of identity and to share his social, psychological and aesthetic enthusiasms.

“Portrait – Janusz” (1984) by Stephen Andrews contains some of these themes. The vinyl hanging is dominated by a loosely rendered outline drawing of an empty suit and tie. At the level of the suit’s leg is a smaller rendering of another empty suit, this time handling (and being observed handling) two nude figures. At the bottom of the painting is a rough outline drawing of Janusz, naked from the chest up, holding up his left hand with what appears to be a stigmata. Bisecting the painting diagonally is a large diamond back rattlesnake. It is hard not to see this image as one of personal liberation – a release from the straight jacket of public appearance and social propriety and an open investigation with the artist examining Dukszta’s sexual, spiritual and social identity.

Andy Fabo’s painting “Janusz and Laocoon” (1984) depicts Dukszta as an analyst and as an observer. Alluding to Greek mythology and classical art, the painting is an illustration of the psychiatrist at work, observing a patient wrestling with a demon serpent. Oliver Girling also dealt with the theme of inner demons, this time picturing Dukszta, like Jacob, wrestling with his own angel or demon doppelganger in the painting “Warring Against Himself” (1985). Another painting by Girling, “Impostor” (1989), addresses the issue of identity, where Dukszta is depicted holding a television remote control while looking over his shoulder at a video shoot featuring a naked reclining male. Dividing the top half of the painting from the bottom half are large block letters spelling out the word “IMPOSTOR,” suggesting the inauthenticity of a double life. 

Probably the most significant interpretation of Dukszta’s life after politics is Michael Merrill’s adaptation of Hogarth’s “The Rake’s Progress,” into a series of three large canvases in 1984. Clearly, Dukszta was no Thomas Rakewell, (Hogarth’s protagonist), neither having inherited a fortune nor having squandered one in such a spectacular fashion. Yet, Dukszta is both fond of recounting his humble arrival in Canada leading to his ascent to membership in Ontario’s political class, and reflective about the events leading up to the end of that career. In this context, having Merrill depict him as a modern day Thomas Rakewell is both self-deprecating ironic.

Merrill’s three scenes are “In His Glory,” “The Last Supper” and “Janusz in Bedlam.” “In His Glory” is modeled on the painting “The Heir,” where Hogarth depicted Thomas Rakewell being fitted for a new suit of clothes during the reading of his father’s will. Merrill depicts Dukszta in a well-tailored pinstripe suit in the process of being painted by his portraitists from the ChromaZone group, Oliver Girling, Brian Burnett and Rae Johnson. Two additional references in this work seem to suggest an undercurrent of disquiet. While being immortalized by his “court painters,” Dukszta thumbs a book by Proust. Dukszta has read Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” more than once, identifying with the novel’s examination of the world of manners and social climbing in late 19^th century Paris. Also in the painting, looking over Janusz’s shoulder is the face of the existential writer and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, the author of “Nausea” and “Being and Nothingness.” Sartre’s existential ideas defined human beings as diminished gods, victims of their own freedom, where instead of a judgmental god, we instead mete out the most exquisite punishment to each other, as we probe the memory of our sins, desires, and past hurts.

The second canvas in the series “The Last Supper,” depicts eleven people, including Dukszta, around a table. The table in the painting seems to be either ovular or round, but the figures grouped around it are all facing toward the picture plane as though arranged on a proscenium stage. The eleven member group and the horizontal organization are really the only features of the painting which recall Leonardo’s “Last Supper.” The image portrays a rather happy dinner party with slightly too much wine, but that too may have been reason enough for Dukszta to give it religious references. The work seems to have been a loosely based conflation of two paintings by Hogarth, “The Orgy” and “The Morning Lévee,” both of which are quoted as hanging pictures in the background right and left of the painting and both of which comment on hedonistic excess and indulgence – quite the opposite of imminent mortal sacrifice.

The “disciples” in this case are the important members of Dukszta’s family and social life at one of their many dinner parties. Dukszta, in the centre right of the painting, has one arm around his wife Janet Churnin. To his right are his brother Andrzej and Maureen Duffy and Basia and Andrzej Jordan Rozwadowski and Maureen Duffy. To his left are Janusz’s sister-in-law Annette Dukszta and Frank and Marilyn Vasilkioti. Winston and Mary Jane Young are at opposite ends of the painting – a compositional solution that was resented by the Youngs and caused a rupture in the friendship. Mary Jane Young asked that she and Winston be altered or removed from the painting but neither Janusz nor Michael Merrill was prepared to change the painting and the friendship was irreparably damaged. Such was the closeness of the social group orbiting around Janusz Dukszta and his brother Andrzej that it had the power to generate such a strong emotional response from a fictitious seating arrangement.

The final painting in the series, “Janusz in Bedlam,” based on Hogarth’s “Bedlam,” is a dystopic vision of Dukszta’s last days as mad, naked and despondent, surrounded by a collage of images of the suffering of Christ. The tragic outcome that this last painting in the series represents recalls the Van Dyck portrait by Paul Young ten years earlier, where the artist prophesied a dark future for his patron. The allusions in the painting to Christ’s crucifixion also recall Stephen Andrews’s painting of the naked Dukszta displaying the stigmata – a theme of Christian symbolism that would be revisited in a number of major commissions by Phil Richards in the 1990s. “Bedlam” remains strangely anomalous – the first two paintings of the series seeming to far better characterize the stylish and social Janusz Dukszta that most people encounter. However, “Bedlam” is critical to understanding Dukszta’s desire to examine, and have others examine, what he calls his dark side.

Following the completion of the Rake’s Progress, Dukszta proposed to Merrill to undertake a series of paintings of scenes from the life of Christ. Merrill’s initial reluctance to take on the commission eventually gave way to Dukszta’s enthusiasms and Merrill produced a series of six canvases depicting the Baptism of Christ, the Sermon on the Mount, the Temptation of Christ, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Unlike the Rake’s Progress, the person of Janusz Dukszta is largely absent from the series, Christ being imagined here instead as a young and physically fit rock star. Dukszta, however, makes a cameo appearance as the voyeuristic reflection in the pool enjoying the seduction and temptation of handsome young Jesus.

Religious allegory and group portraits of family and friends played an important role in Dukszta’s commissions. Dukszta credits his brother Andrzej as a collaborator and “enabler” in his art collecting, recalling that is was Andrzej who suggested the early portrait of the two brothers by Barbara Mercer (1963). Andrzej Dukszta and Barbara Mercer were friends and the artist had asked Andrzej to sit for a portrait. Andrzej, however, insisted that it should be a double portrait of the two brothers. The bond between the brothers was very close and over the years purchased and commissioned artwork was presented by Janusz both as gifts for Andrzej and his family, and as a form of repayment for outstanding debts. Janusz commissioned Rae Johnson to paint a portrait of the two brothers in “Janusz Sitting on Sofa, Andrzej Behind,” (1982) and Phil Richards painted “Family Portrait at Andrzej’s” (1985), depicting Andrzej and his children Monika, Witold and Tala with a porphyry bust of Janusz. “Two Brothers Take a Moonlight Stroll” (1990), also by Richards, depicts the close relationship shared by the two men, while sister-in-law Annette gazes out across the city and her son Adam sits in the lower right hand corner of the canvas. 

Motivated to reprise Michael Merrill’s “Last Supper,” Dukszta began talking to friends about a “Lamentation,” a reinterpretation of the Botticelli “Lamentation” in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. It would be a large religious allegorical commission featuring the deceased Dukszta lamented by his close family and friends. Tony Wilson, Dukszta’s companion at the time was to have carried out the commission, but disagreements over the pace of the development of the commission led Dukszta to instead ask New York based-artist Yves Tessier to take over. Tessier worked closely with Dukszta’s friend Susan Teskey to map and compose the various significant people in the Dukszta orbit, also conscripting Andrzej’s daughters Monika and Tala to complete the four panel, 17 foot long mural which was painted in the living room of Dukszta’s apartment.

The “Lamentation” by Yves Tessier (1990) depicts Dukszta laid out in the middle of the painting, dramatically foreshortened with his head in the near foreground and his feet, caressed by Mary Magdalene (Susan Teskey), extending into the imaginary space of picture, while thirteen other friends and family observe the scene. Picking up from the religious themes he had developed with Stephen Andrews, Michael Merrill and Phil Richards, Dukszta had decided he wanted to be dead in the painting. In subsequent years Dukszta commissioned Tessier to do two more works representing the Duksza orbit. “Eight Heads” (1998) is a series of small painted terra cotta busts of varying scale representing Janusz, Andrzej and Annette Dukszta, Eleanor Beattie, nephew Adam, Janet Churnin and Jack VanDuyvenbode. A recently completed commission of small al fresco portraits in plaster by Tessier features the profiles of Janusz, Adam, Annette, Eleanor, Susan Teskey and Max Streicher (2009).

In the 1980s, Phil Richards’s style had evolved from his Hockneyesque broad flat areas of saturated colour characteristic of his work of the in the 1970s, into figures that began to appear more sculpted and spaces that were perpectivally deeper and more dramatic. His earlier, simplified rendering gave way to a photo realistic attention to detail and surfaces. These developments in Richard’s style appealed to Dukszta’s interest in Renaissance and Baroque art history and his increasing appetite for more, and more elaborate commissions, beginning a series of commissions quoting art historical styles and allegorical programs. Notable in this context is the portrait of Dukszta entitled “Janusz Reflection” (1985), quoting directly Raphael’s “Madonna della Sedia,” executed in the same year as “Portrait of Andrzej’s Family.” In “Altared States” (1990), Dukszta, the traveler and art connoisseur and fan of all things carnal is depicted as a 17^th century aristocrat, standing in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria before Bernini’s famous sculptural and architectural installation, “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa.” The constructed painting has its own light source and is remarkable for the rich rendering of the scagliola in the flanking pilasters and entablature and the rendering of the great folds of the apparently yellow cape, which is in reality, a raincoat. In “Janusz as Bernini” it appears that Dukszta has been interrupted from his reading of the guide book to the artwork, to turn and glance at the viewer, while a red curtain appears to have been pulled aside to afford him a private viewing of Bernini’s strange and erotic altar piece. 

Adaptations of well-known scenes from Renaissance and Baroque art continued to be an important part of Richards’s commissions through the 1990s. “Janusz and Jack” (1995), is a play on Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Theresa,” replacing St. Theresa with Dukszta and the angel of love with Janusz’s friend Jack VanDuyvenbode. “Roman Holiday” (1995) references Raphael’s “School of Athens” (including a cameo of the artist seated with his sketch pad in the lower left corner.) The major work of this time is a hinged, two-sided, polyptych by Richards entitled “Six Scenes from the life of the Virgin” (1997) that features scenes of “Mary and St. Anne,” “The Presentation at the Temple,” “The Annunciation,” “The Marriage at Cana” and “The Pieta.” Modeling the figures are Janusz’s friends Chloe Griffin as Mary and her mother Krystyne Griffin as St. Anne. Friends Jack VanDuyvenbode modeled the naked angel Gabriel and Alex Williams the business-suited Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ in Pieta respectively, while Janusz and Andrzej model themselves.

“Scenes from the Life of the Virgin” is the most elaborate and richly appointed of Dukszta’s commissions. Each panel is eccentric in its shape – constructed to accommodate the details of the images within and individually framed and gilded. Each scene is set in lush contemporary Edenic environments and interiors filled with white hollyhocks and lilies, scarlet satins, cerulean blue skies and gilded surfaces. The biblical characters are modeled by young, physically attractive people, whose contemporary nakedness sexualizes the otherwise religious Christian narrative. With the side panels fully opened, the work is dominated by large centre panel “Annunciation.” A blonde and naked angel Gabriel, seen from behind, reveals himself to the naked Virgin. Startled, she vainly clutches her breast in an attempt to cover herself. In the right panel, in a reconfiguration of the Marriage at Cana, Mary, dressed in a strapless evening gown, empties the last drop from a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne, while being watched by Jesus in the person of a dark haired gentleman in a suit. The side panel closes to reveal the climactic Pieta. Mary supports the dead Christ between her legs while the scene is illuminated by Andrzej, holding a lantern and revealed by Janusz, pulling back a scarlet robe. The lantern as the single light source intensifies the visual drama, sharply illuminating the features of Mary, Jesus, the two brothers and the broad expanse of the dead Christ’s flesh. Everything else falls off sharply into darkness. Revealed is the flesh of the mother and of the son – the central figures of the Christian drama, seen as objects of worship and carnal desire.

Around the turn of the millennium, the portraits of Dukszta begin to change. They cease representing the dynamic, mercurial, mischievous and feline character that we have learned to know from portraits past and instead, begin to profile the aging subject. “Janusz as Father,”(1997) by Phil Richards, “Janusz Deconstructed,” (2001) by Fabrizio Perozzi and Bryan McBurney’s photograph “Determination” (2005) are portraits which appear to contrast the drive to live with the inevitable process of aging. It is hard too, not to see the photographs of Vincenzo Pietropaolo, “Janusz and His Books,” (2005) and Bryan McBurney “The Light Shines on Janusz,” (2006) as expressions of saudade, elegies to the acquisitions and accomplishments of a brighter past. 

Dukszta’s life threatening illness in 2006 and his painfully slow recovery is documented by Phil Richards in “In the Hospital” (2006), where an apparently impatient and glum Dukszta reads a newspaper in a hospital bed. On the bedside table is a vase of flowers, a tomato and an exercise weight. His long illness and convalescence caused his muscles to atrophy significantly requiring substantial follow-up exercise and physiotherapy. A session in his home was documented by Goran Petkovski in a series of 15 black and white photographs in “The Physiotherapy Session” (2007). Looking at the ravages visited upon both the body and the will in these photographs, one cannot help but wonder if this is the same “Bedlam” Dukszta had in mind some 22 years before.

Over five decades Janusz Dukszta commissioned 70 portraits of himself, his immediate family and extended family of friends and companions. It is a body of portraiture that is a very personal record of the man, the friends and family that surround him, and the ideas and passions that accompanied him through the stages of his life. The commissions are a primary subject, but are also the artifacts of Dukszta’s personal, professional and intellectual engagements. They are a testament to his commitment to aesthetic engagement – an engagement with the artist and to a life informed and reflected by art. His accumulated commissions record the succeeding stages of his life’s passage, documenting his aspirations and fears, his desires and his melancholies, and the significant people who have played a role in it. With the artists he adored and debated and entertained, and with his family and friends as willing accomplices, Dukszta became the co-author of the artistic program that is his life.

Gordon Hatt, January 2010

Notes

1. Janusz Dukszta was born in 1932 in Lida, Poland. His father fled Poland for Great Britain after the Russian annexation in 1939 to be joined by the family in London after the war in 1946. He studied medicine in Dublin, Ireland. After finishing his studies he immigrated to Canada in 1959 where he specialized in psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Dukszta was the NDP member of provincial parliament in the Ontario Legislature for the west-end Toronto riding of Parkdale from 1971 to 1981. Following the 1981 election he returned to work at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre in Toronto.

2. The best known images of the early abstract genre are Matisse’s portraits and busts of Jeanette for example, Portrait of Madame Matisse with a Green Stripe, 1905, Statens Museum for Kundst, Copenhagen, and Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, Art Institute of Chicago.

3. Paul Young was born in Toronto and attended the Ontario College of Art from 1955 to 1958. An earlier portrait of Dukszta by Paul Young, Thalidomide, set the stage for the Van Dyck portrait.

4. Cf. Anthony Van Dyck, Lord John Stuart and his Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, National Gallery, London, ca. 1638.

5. The theme of melancholy is underscored here with the ominous silhouette of the gun behind the head of the spectre. According to Dukszta, Young declared that Dukszta’s fate would be a death by suicide, and painted this reference into the portrait. 

6. The memento mori (Latin: "Remember you will die") is a genre of art featuring symbols of death and transience. Memento mori references in art trace back to the Middle Ages and become a reoccurring theme in 17th century painting: cf. Nicholas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637, Museé du Louvre, and frequently found in Dutch still life painting such as Pieter Claesz , Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

7. Communicated orally by Janusz Dukszta.

8. “The gallery's home was in Oliver Girling's studio space at 320 Spadina Avenue. For the next two years, ChromaZone defiantly enforced their unusual mandate: to show figurative painting, practice inclusivity, be artist-supported and above all be spontaneous, alive and fun. Donna Lypchuk, Chromaliving, unpublished manuscript, 2009. 

9. Herb Tookey was a PhD candidate in psychology and a student of Dukszta’s and later part of the full time staff at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre.

10. Rae Johnson’s paintings were based on Polaroids made during a Halloween party at the Cameron in 1981. The paintings were installed in the back room a month later. Ursula Pflug wrote an article in the second issue of NOW magazine entitled "Art and Artsies meet at the Cameron," and the exhibition was reviewed by Jean Randolph in Vanguard magazine. The series of eight paintings depicted the band “The Government,” and Tim Jocelyn and Andy Fabo dancing and a triptych representing Oliver Girling and a female friend posing nude upstairs in the Cameron. The triptych was purchased Dukszta and installed in a prominent place in his apartment.

11. Represented in “Lamentation” are Tala Dukszta, Thade Rachwa≈, Janet Churnin, Jean Lee, Witold Dukszta, Vince and Julianna Pietropaolo, the artist Yves Tessier, Susan Teskey, Anthony McFarlane, Eleanor Bettie, Andrzej Dukszta, Monika Dukszta, Adam Dukszta and Stanis≈awa Dukszta.

12. Uncharacteristically, when asked why, the analyst is at a complete loss to explain. Communicated orally by Janusz Dukszta.

A Family Tree

Toronto's Don Valley is known for the natural history contained within its layers of geological sedimentation, where traces of the plant and animal life that once thrived in Southern Ontario’s prehistory survive as fossilized impressions. One sandy, fossil-rich layer called the Don Formation contains evidence of the mollusks and trees existing in the region some 120,000 years ago, the most notable example perhaps being the plant species Acer torontoniensis. Thought to be an evolutionary ancestor of the sugar maple, Acer torontoniensis (Latin for Toronto maple) is named for the city of its discovery.

Torontoniensis (pronounce every syllable: to-ron-to-ni-en-sis) is also the collective name taken by a group of artists who began exhibiting together in Toronto in the mid 1990s. Like the many other exhibiting collectives that emerged in Toronto during those years, Torontoniensis took root in the rocky soil that was the Canadian art scene during the last decade of the 20th century. And like a tree it grew and flourished from 1995 to 2005, producing eight exhibitions and representing the work of 32 artists. It was rooted in Toronto’s visual art scene of the 1990s and its branches were the artists who came from across the country, and eventually from as far away as Scotland. Its leaves were the many artworks that were exhibited and that were made to be exhibited in the collectives embrace.

Only a decade distant, the pre-digital, pre-Internet decade of the 1990s in many ways seems like a foreign country. It was a time of cultural reaction and economic restructuring in the face of a devastating recession. Government support for the arts, which had grown through the 80s, weakened in the face of the recession and challenges to government’s role in the economy. And during this period, Canadian art schools continued to deliver talented and ambitious graduates into an ailing economy and a barely breathing art market. As commercial art galleries closed down, artist run centres and artist collectives became the new centres of an emerging visual culture. The depressed economy provided a stable supply of relatively inexpensive raw urban factory spaces and downtown storefronts that were converted to galleries with the savings and sweat equity of the artists and the eventual support of the provincial and federal arts councils.

Canadian artist run culture in the 90s was a mixture of do-it-yourself marketing and sub-cultural salons. Artists gathered into groups loosely defined by the art schools they had attended or by their circle of friends, or they gravitated to groups defined by the media they worked with or the ideas that inspired them. Some were motivated to market themselves and their art, and others were content to make art intended to be seen by their friends and colleagues and to live within a street level cultural ambience that stimulated connections between people and nurtured a unique sense of community. Being part of an artist collective became an expression of community, and of cultural, career and individual survival -- a way to keep talking about, thinking about and making art when the rest of the culture was turning its back.

1. June 8 - 11, 1995, Mark Adair, Kate Wilson, Tim Howe, Andrew Cripps, Richard Banks, Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op.

Torontoniensis began in the Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op in Toronto’s west end. A project of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto, the Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op had a mandate to provide stabilized rents and legal live/work spaces for artists. Tim Howe and Kate Wilson had moved to Lakeshore Village from Durham, Ontario in 1993. Wilson was a painter who worked primarily with oil on vellum, and was creating a body of work in which dilapidation and retro styling seemed to emerge from of a vortex of furious painting. Howe was developing video and mixed media installations, soundtrack compositions for film and multiple screen live performance works, taking found video material and modifying it to produce absurdist scenarios. Wilson’s work was represented in the Canada Council Art Bank collection and she had recently received a copy of The Art Bank: Celebrating Twenty Years 1972-92. Mark Adair, their new neighbour in the co-op was listed on page 15. Howe approached Adair at a co-op meeting and said, "Hey. Toronto Bank Robbery. Mark Adair."2

Wilson was an organizer. While in Durham, she and Howe had been involved in the CCAOS Festival (Canadian Centre for the Arts in Owen Sound) and Wilson had curated exhibitions of the work of Andrew Da Costa and later Mike Constable and Gail Geltner at Durham Art Gallery. The existence of a 1500 square foot gallery at her new home in the co-op presented itself as an opportunity, and so Wilson and Howe decided to approach Adair about organizing an exhibition. Mark Adair had recently returned to Canada following a period of time in the US. After finishing graduate school at the University of Victoria, he became involved in the founding of the Green Party of Canada. A committed environmentalist, Adair had developed a figurative approach to sculpture, painting and drawing to create political allegories of an ecologically suicidal society. Exhausted by politics, Adair’s response to the idea of organizing an exhibition was straightforward. I wont do anything unless its fun, he said. It has to be fun.3

Co-op members Andrew Cripps and Richard Banks were invited to be part of the four day co-op exhibition. Andrew Cripps exhibited an installation of semaphore figures and Richard Banks exhibited his two of his paintings. Mark Adair exhibited the beginnings of his massive Chaise Longue, Tim Howe installed a picture in picture video and Kate Wilson exhibited her oil on vellum paintings. There was no budget for publicity or mailing so word of the opening was spread on co-op bulletin boards and by telephone. When asked what was memorable about the exhibition, the Stoly fountain at the opening was recalled by more than one of the members. The exhibition was short, informal, produced on a shoestring and not all of the artists even agree that it was in fact their first show as a group. The official inaugural exhibition would take place a year later, with a new tongue-twisting name and a downtown location.

2. March 1 - 31,1996, TORONTONIENSIS: Inaugural exhibition by Mark Adair, Andrew Cripps, Suzanne Gauthier, Tim Howe, Kate Wilson, 425 Adelaide Street West, Toronto.

There are no blue prints for artist collectives they are the creations of groups of individuals who bond together voluntarily and their method of functioning is a product of the dynamic interaction of the members. Artist collectives function fluidly and dynamically, with duties and responsibilities falling to those who are able and energetic. People come and go according to their commitment and their contributions to the group. Typically, a core group of energized activists, organizers, and grant writers is the glue holding a collective together. Their energy and enthusiasm for the project spreads outward to involve other artists as exhibitors and as potential activist members of the collective.

Mark Adair, Tim Howe and Kate Wilson emerged as the core group of the collective for the inaugural show. The name of the collective was suggested by Adair, who having recently returned to Canada from the US, found the name to be an apt metaphor of what was organic and unique about living and making art in Toronto and Canada. Howe was the electrical genius and humourist of the group, in charge of providing the power requirements for lighting and video and keeping it fun. Howe could write and he put together clever, funny press releases that caught people’s attention. Wilson was exhibiting with the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Artists with their Work programme, had participated in the Surrey Art Gallery’s China/Canada exchange exhibition and had many contacts within the art community. Most importantly, she possessed the drive and vision to make it happen. She was an important link for the members of Torontoniensis to other artists and it was Wilson who invited her friend Suzanne Gautier to exhibit with the collective for its inaugural show.

In the large unheated space on Adelaide Street Kate Wilson installed her gestural expressionistic oil on vellum paintings of lush but toxic plant life and generic portrait heads. Andrew Cripps further developed his semaphore figures to encompass an entire wall, and Suzanne Gautier exhibited a large encaustic. Mark Adair exhibited his notorious Chicken Choker – a nightmare of unbridled consumption rendered as an autoerotic asphyxiation, and the Chaise Longue (The Coffin Project), which he had exhibited in a previous stage of its development in the co-op show. The Chaise Longue is a massive carved wood, bone and ceramic sculpture that took Adair over 10 years to complete and which he would exhibit in various states of completion in four Torontoniensis shows. Begun in 1990, Chaise Longue consists of a life-size medieval bed, on which lies a deathly, desiccated hermaphroditic figure. Hovering over the figure are groupings of angels, skeletons and demons that are, in effect, spectres of the Hermaphrodites dream. The work resists definitive interpretation as Adair sought to explore, through the process of making, how creation of myths permit us to act in the world. The intensity of the exhibition was unrelieved by Tim Howe’s video installation that featured a dialogue between a mechanical bird and cat, with the bird reciting a scene from the movie Goodfellas, You think I’m funny? You think I’m here to amuse you? Clearly, these artists had other ideas.

Torontoniensis’s inaugural exhibition was a mixed success. None of the newspapers, entertainment weeklies or art magazines reviewed the exhibition and no one bought anything. But the group of artists had succeeded in describing an emerging group aesthetic and artists in the community took notice. By the time of the next show three years later, the number of participating artists had doubled.

3. May 1 - May 29, 1999, No Fun Without You: John Abrams, Mark Adair, Shary Boyle, Catherine Daigle, Gail Geltner, Tim Howe, Francis LeBoutillier, Warren Quigley, Adrienne Trent & Kate Wilson, 425 Adelaide Street West, Toronto.

The bittersweet title of the second Torontoniensis exhibition, No Fun Without You, caught the tenor of the times. Betty Ann Jordan called No Fun Without You millennial humour, and on the cusp of Y2K it had the feeling of being dark, pessimistic and slightly manic.4 The exhibitions preoccupation with death and mortality aligned it with some of the major themes of the visual art of the 1990s, where the AIDS epidemic, ecological degradation, and the economic recession of the decade caused widespread cultural pessimism and despair.5 Mark Adair’s work both carried the burden of his experience as a founder of the Green Party of Canada and screamed his despair at the cultures apparent headlong rush to ecological suicide. He exhibited his mixed media assemblage Mechanical Spirits and his series of small paintings Death Goes Sailing, his darkly humourous series about death without purpose. Kate Wilson exhibited a piece entitled Molecular Adorn, influenced by a look back at her rural culture experience, specifically car culture, of living in Durham. Together with Tim Howe’s manic video animation of actors dressed as twin angels, spitting fireballs at cartoon dogs, the trio formed a gathering point for artists whose work variously touched on dislocation, loss and madness. John Abrams’s triptych from his Rethinking Canadian History series echoed the patriotic name of the collective -- his paintings of mediated images of Canadian history and geography underscored the uncertainty and pessimism that pervaded the country following the 1995 referendum in Quebec. Catherine Daigle’s shadow-box memento mori assemblage Vanitas (Stilleven), Gail Geltner’s photo-essay documenting the decline and death of her mother, Francis LeBouthillier’s video installation Onion Skins and Shary Boyle’s mixed media installation, were all meditations on transience and loss, while Warren Quigley’s Companions, an installation of stacked animal cages containing large faux-fur balls, and Adrienne Trent’s Sisters, were explorations in the realm of the disembodied and the surreal. The exhibition received favourable reviews in the Globe and Mail by Gary Michael Dault, where it was accompanied by a large photo of Catherine Daigle’s Vanitas, and by Betty Ann Jordan in Toronto Life. Torontoniensis had arrived.

The same forces that bring artists together also work in reverse. Artists drift apart as friends or colleagues, or their interests change and they find new connections and collaborators. Following No Fun, founding member Kate Wilson left the group to participate in the founding of a new artist collective, Persona Volare, leaving Mark Adair and Tim Howe as the two remaining founding members. With Wilson’s departure, Catherine Daigle and John Abrams stepped forward to take leadership positions in the group. Daigle brought to the group her passionate commitment to the project as well as her organizational and promotional skills. John Abrams was well known in Toronto through his regular exhibitions at the Garnet Press Gallery until its demise in 1996. He and his wife Carla Garnet brought the group significant profile in the Toronto art community and a web of connections to talented and developing artists.

4. May 20 - June 17, 2000, More Fun: John Abrams, Rhonda Abrams, Mark Adair, Beth Biggs, Laima Bruveris, David Craig, Catherine Daigle, Robert Houle, Tim Howe, 425 Adelaide Street West. Toronto.

Just over a year after No Fun, More Fun demonstrated the influence of the new core members. The More Fun exhibition advertised its inclusiveness by inviting artists whose interests ranged from pop culture, political culture, art history, craft traditions, economics, iconography, death and sexuality.6 Tim Howe continued to be the standard bearer for a pop culture gone horribly wrong and, for the opening, arranged to have made 5,000 fortune cookies containing bizarre fortunes, distributed by a woman dressed in a cat costume. Yet, as a whole, the exhibition demonstrated strong national and ecological preoccupations. Mark Adair’s Inventions of Greed continued some of the formal characteristics of the previous exhibitions Mechanical Spirits, thrusting mythic warships off the wall and into the spectators space. Adair’s archly dark humour had its absurdist, pop culture counterpoint in Tim Howe’s Klaus Super301, a video installation showing a Klansman-like figure in a jail cell viewing a modified animation of the 1950s Looney Tunes cartoon character Pepé Le Pew as a Nazi collaborator. Guest artist Beth Biggs’s, Gaze, focussed on adornment and political implications behind gaze. Catherine Daigle exhibited her multi-piece work Eleanor, a series of 13 shadow boxes that tell the story of her grandmother’s early pioneering life in Saskatchewan. Guest artist David Craig installed his photographs of Dundas Village in North Eastern Greenland, the most northern community traditionally inhabited by humans, and Laila Bruveris exhibited her ceramic installation The Village, a meditation on urban sprawl and ecological deterioration. Robert Houle exhibited Savage Love (Delacroix Indians), part of his larger critique of the commodification and objectification of aboriginal people and Rhonda Abrams exhibited her campy music video Trailer Song, where she sang of the virtues of country life. John Abrams exhibited a series of paintings called Canadian History from his Rethinking History (1991-1999) series. These monochrome paintings of the Plains of Abraham, the fathers of Confederation and an iceberg were alternately coloured by the addition of fire and a spray of gold droplets, a further elaboration of Abrams’s ambivalent relationship with his country’s history.

5. October 10 - November 3, 2001, Torontoniensis: QTIPS, at West Wing: John Abrams, Mark Adair, Ho Tam, Catherine Daigle, and Tim Howe, West Wing Artspace, 1267 Queen St. West.

West Wing Art Space was a small artist run gallery founded in 2000 by Karen Azoulay, Paul P. and Ingrid Z, three recent grads from York University’s Visual Arts programme. The gallery quickly gained a reputation in Toronto as a centre of a street-level fashion, music and art. In that context, the group of artists in the Torontoniensis collective represented an older generation, and, in recognition of this, called themselves QTIPS, to signify their white or greying hair.

The press release for the exhibition continued the self deprecation and irony, . . . a show by a group of artists all interested in gender politics, politics, death and politics and all that crap. -- as if the kids would be rolling their eyes at all that. Yet, despite the defensive posturing, the group of accomplished but comparatively introspective mid-career artists again caught the uncertain mood of the time. RM Vaughan listed this apocalyptic fright show as one of the ten best exhibitions of 2001.7 Opening almost a month to the day after the attack on the World Trade Centre, the images and themes that had long been part of the work of this group of artists were inevitably read in the light of the confusion, fear and despair resulting from that catastrophe. The centrepiece of the exhibition was Mark Adair’s Harvest Time, exhibited beside the deathly portrait bust he had created for his Chaise Longue. For those wracked by doubt, Harvest Time, a painting of skeletal figures reaping not stalks of wheat but blocks of housing, could hardly be missed as an illustration of the biblical admonition “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”8 Against the self-righteousness of the powerful, John Abrams image of the arrest of a young shirtless man seemed to foreshadow the suspicion and obsession with security that has since dominated life in the American orbit. For those just trying to make sense of it all in front our televisions, caught between the depressing images of George Bush Senior and George Bush Junior, Tim Howe’s pet cat Prrrl, caught in the middle, was the figure many of us related to in his video Long Pig Finds Cleopatra’s Diary (also called Long Pig@Ground Zero). For those who felt powerless in the face of world events, Ho Tams series of candid photographs of tired subway commuters in Passages (1998), not only evoked the enervating despair we experience in the face of global conflict but also recalled the 1995 saran gas attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo in the Tokyo subway. Finally, Catherine Daigle’s Hard Questions, shadow boxes of images of pale lifeless hands and bunches of flowers accompanied by the text from the Song of Solomon, was an elegiac statement which seemed to long for a more hopeful past.

6. March 8 - April 21, 2002, Songs From the Waterfront: John Abrams, Mark Adair, David Craig, Catherine Daigle, Libby Hague, Robert Houle, Tim Howe, Katherine Knight, Alistair Magee, York Quay Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West.

Returning to a large exhibition space after the small store front West Wing gallery allowed Torontoniensis to again represent a large group of invited artists. Less than a year after the West Wing exhibition, Adair, Daigle and Howe exhibited pieces that were elaborations of work in progress or that had been previously exhibited. The larger York Quay gallery space permitted John Abrams to exhibit his multi panel assemblages Land Mark Wheels (Red & Blue), which continued the Canadian iconography of his Rethinking History series. After exhibiting with Abrams in the two person exhibition Landmark: The Paintings of Robert Houle and John Abrams, organized by the Tom Thomson Art Gallery and the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Robert Houle was invited back to exhibit with the group a second time and his paintings continued their direct dialogue with Abrams’s Landmark Wheels. Another dialogue was initiated by the inclusion of Libby Hague’s two channel video Parade, which found a counterpart in Tim Howe’s found video manipulations. Hague collaged watercolour figures on to video footage of parades on the right channel and contrasted them with a left channel of archival footage of an approving audience during a political campaign. The resulting asynchronous loops created a manic interplay between the two screens. The exhibitions horizons ranged from the street detritus of Alistair Magee’s meticulously painted hand notes to Katherine Knights large format wide angle silver prints of placid bodies of water.

7. October 16 - November 20, 2003, Good Medicine: John Abrams, Mark Adair, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Catherine Daigle, Libby Hague, Robert Houle, Tim Howe, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, 263 Phillip St., East Campus Hall, Waterloo, ON.

Good Medicine at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery was the groups fifth exhibition in four years an ambitious pace given that the artists were pursuing solo careers and requisite day jobs while they organized and planned their collective project. A number of the core members of the collective had also been involved in establishing the artist run co-op gallery Loop in 2000. At the same time, Torontoniensiss move from rental spaces and artist co-op galleries to public galleries afforded the group a larger profile and additional resources. Since More Fun, additional support had been coming to the group from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. At the University of Waterloo, Libby Hague exhibited with the group again installing her work Children See Everything, an ongoing series drawn from childhood recollections. This piece grouped together 30 groups of prints recalling comic book cells that described the large and small events of childhood. Guest artist Mary Anne Backhouse’s work fit well with the ecological/political profile that the group had developed. She exhibited two pieces, Focus and Petition, allegories of human conflict in the context of contemporary battles over land and resources. Tim Howe exhibited a new video installation entitled Tim Howe exhibited a new video installation entitled The Passionate David, an assembly of delusional correspondence by a Toronto street person by the name of David, juxtaposed with a video of an angel hovering above an inferno and John Abrams exhibited Everybody's Happy in Hollywood, the beginning of a new series of work based on film stills.

8. November 12 - December 31, 2005, Suitcase, the Good Medicine Group of Independent Artists: From Toronto (Torontoniensis): John Abrams, Mark Adair, Jane Buyers, Catherine Daigle, Tim Howe, JJ Lee, Alistair McGee, Rhonda Parkes, From Scotland: Matthew Inglis, Stuart Mackenzie, Moira Scott, Alastair Strachan, Donald Urquhart, York Quay Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay West, Toronto, ON.,

It had been ten years since the first exhibition at the Lakeshore Village Co-op. Following the recession early in the decade, Torontoniensis had emerged along with the revival of the visual arts in Toronto. It had survived and thrived to embody the ambivalence that greeted the new millennium, to then witness the changes taking place in the world following the event of September 11, 2001. During this time, the artists, who had at one time had been outsiders exhibiting in rough unserviced commercial spaces, had progressed to being invited to show in publicly financed institutional art galleries. Along with the rest of the economy, the once sleepy Canadian art market had heated up. In Toronto, people were displaying a newfound wealth and were buying art in the galleries that were springing up all along Queen Street West. Despite the growing indications of the certainty of global warming, the globalized economy was on a roll in 2005 and the production and consumption of non-renewable resources was advancing unchecked. Even the art world had become global in ways never before seen, as art fairs and biennales all over the world became part of a non-stop world tour of artists, curators, dealers and collectors.

And where did Torontoniensis fit into this new world? What role did its eco-nationalist message play in the transnational world of hyper-capitalism? Was this species of local vegetation exportable and transferable to the global digital age? Or did this metaphor even work any more? Not all the members of the collective liked the awkward Latin name and since the Waterloo show, the group had also been calling itself Good Medicine -- an identity crisis, perhaps, signalling a less fun and more socially responsible and pragmatic approach to making and exhibiting art in the new world order.

The Suitcase exhibition was the collective’s foray into the globalized world of art. It was organized as an exchange show where five invited Scottish artists would reciprocate and in turn host the Canadian artists in a group showing in Scotland. Both Catherine Daigle, with her When Daddy Comes Home, All the Fun Stops, and Tim Howe, with his Les Jumeaux, exhibited digitally manipulated prints for the first time. Inspired by the theme of the exhibition Daigle also created a new piece out of an old suitcase. The suitcase was filled with bright yellow sunflowers whose message of sunny optimism was tempered by the inclusion of a scroll of flies.9 In another flower reference, John Abrams exhibited She was like a flower, from his Betty Blue Suite. The suite was a continuation of his film stills series and was derived from the 1986 erotic French film Betty Blue. Mark Adair exhibited the Eternal Pussy, who represents Life, Deaths counterpoint in the series of drawings Death is in Trouble Now. Guest Canadian artists Jane Buyers exhibited a ceramic book-work, J. J. Lee two of her juicy canvases of ironic Chinoiserie, Alistair McGee his acrylic renderings of found notes and graffiti, and Rhonda Parkes a series of enlarged instructional medical photographs addressing pregnancy.

As much as the collective was rooted in Toronto, the core members realized they would have to look beyond the city for new exhibitions, and Scotland was part of that calculation. Since its inception Torontoniensis had provided exhibition opportunities and exposure for its members and its invited guests, and making connections and creating events was what the group did well. But the Scotland show didn’t materialize and the days of rough space warehouse shows had long since passed in Toronto’s gentrified downtown core. Without another show to look toward, Torontoniensis drifted as its members pursued their individual careers.

But the body blow to the collective was the death of Catherine Daigle in December 2006 following a lengthy illness. Catherine had been the group’s graphic artist and media contact and its driving force after the departure of Kate Wilson. She was admired and adored by her colleagues for her feistiness and for her determination. As much as the work of any other artist in the group, Catherine Daigle’s work carried the minor tone that came to characterize the collective -- a tone that Carla Garnet characterized as a deep sadness. It was perhaps Catherine Daigle’s artist statement in the press release for the Suitcase exhibition that summed up not only her attitude to her own work, but also the legacy of Torontoniensis:

"[it] . . . has largely been informed by an interest in the transitory nature of life and how we, on a regular basis, reconfigure deeds to provide meaning."

Born of the economic uncertainties of the 1990s, Torontoniensis was a part of the movement of artist collectives and co‑operatives that emerged in those lean years – "the do it yourself " energy that helped to create the international reputation of Toronto as a centre for art. Over the course of a decade the collective brought together a wide variety of artists in exhibitions that gave form to many of the anxieties and desires of the time, and in doing so they made a mark on the culture of their city -- creating meaning for themselves, for the artists whose work they admired and exhibited, and for the community lucky enough to take part in their vision.

Gordon Hatt, 2008

Endnotes

1. The National Gallery of Canada's acquisition of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire in 1990 began in Canada a national debate about role of art and the state. See Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power, and the State, eds. Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbaut, John O'Brian, University of Toronto Press: 1996.

2. Email from Kate Wilson, June 30, 2008.

3. Conversation with Mark Adair, June 15, 2008.

4. Betty Anne Jordan, Toronto Life, June 1999, page 34.

5. For a discussion of the subject of death in the art of the 1990s see Adam Gopnik, A Death in Venice, New Yorker, 2 Aug. 1993, pp. 67-73.

6. Introduction to exhibition brochure No Fun Without You.

7. "The Year in Pictures," RM Vaughan, EYE Weekly, December 20, 2001.

8. Galatians 6:7.

9. Mark Adair had been reading biblical prophecy to frame his dismay at the hubris and ecological blindness of industrial capitalism and had quoted to Catherine a verse from Isaiah 7:18. "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria." The passage is in reference to Isaiah 13:5, "They are coming from a far country, From the farthest horizons, The LORD and His instruments of indignation, To destroy the whole land."