Presented by the Scarborough Arts Council, CONTACT Scarborough is a multi-faceted project that explores issues of public and private space, representation, and notions of identity associated with Scarborough. The project includes photography, video and a podcast developed by Scarborough youth. CONTACT Scarborough considers how photographic practice is expanding and presented in time-based media while dealing with the experiences of those living in an area under-represented in the social and cultural life of Toronto.

With the Scarborough Arts Council and Mobile City Project, this podcast involves youth from Scarborough, reflecting on their images of their environment. Thanks to Angelica, Anesha, James, Tammy, Tolu, Tope, and the Boys & Girls Club of East Scarborough.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You Knew Everything There Was to Know, and photographs from Weekend Getaways, MobileCity Podcast presented at CONTACT 2008 in cooperation with the Scarborough Arts Council, Scarborough Civic Centre.

Gallery

Acknowledgements

With assistance from:

An Exhibition organized by the Way Up Way Down collective (Yam Lau, Sunny Kerr, Tania Ursomarzo).

This exhibition invites a number of artists to produce book works or related artworks in a bookstore. The structure of the exhibition is designed to adapt and travel to other bookstores in different cities and countries. New artists, especially those living in the city of the exhibition, will be added with each new show. The first exhibition will open in 23 June, 2007 at Balfour Books, Toronto.

Weekend Getaways: The Vernacular Architecture of Suburbia. bookwork. “Titles” is an intervention in a bookstore organized by the Way Up Way Down collective. Presented in Toronto, Amherst, Mass., Montreal and beyond.

Titles I
An Exhibtion of Artists’ Book Works
organized by the WayUpWayDown collective
23 June, 07- 8 September, 07.
Opening: Saturday, 23 June, 2007 from 2-5 pm
Balfour Books. 601 College Street, Toronto, ON M6G 1B5. 416-531-9911.
noon-11pm daily

About

An Exhibition organized by the Way Up Way Down collective (Yam Lau, Sunny Kerr, Tania Ursomarzo).

This exhibition invites a number of artists to produce book works or related artworks in a bookstore. The structure of the exhibition is designed to adapt and travel to other bookstores in different cities and countries. New artists, especially those living in the city of the exhibition, will be added with each new show. The first exhibition will open in 23 June, 2007 at Balfour Books, Toronto.

For Titles, I created Weekend Getaways: The Vernacular Architecture of Suburbia. This is a limited edition book, hard-cover, cloth-bound with foil-blocked embossed type on the cover, of approximately 100 colour pages. The book attempts to define the styles, tropes or semiotic of suburbs primarily through photographs, annotations, automatic writing, rigidly designed text and partial diagrams. The content will simultaneously challenge and reinforce the stereotypes associated with some suburban life.

Introduction

Although it is among the best of them, Richmond is, finally and undeniably, a suburb, only that,
with all the word implies about window boxes and hedges;
about wives walking pugs; about clocks striking the hours in empty rooms.

–Michael Cunningham, The Hours

The long-held antipathy towards the suburbs maintained by advocates of urban space —exemplified here in Cunningham’s novel—is nothing new. But at the beginning of the 21^st century, that view has started to shift. An appreciation of the suburbs as an important site of study and artistic production is emerging, and Andrew McAllister is one of the artists who is bringing this about.

At once gorgeous, funny and disturbing, Weekend Getaways breaks from a stale tradition that treats the suburbs as limited and limiting; rather, the work suggests infinite possibilities for suburban exploration and reflection. Far from being a simplistic commentary on a stereotyped vacuous lifestyle, Weekend Getaways paradoxically provides viewers with an intimate glimpse of the suburbs via a methodology of detached observance.

In keeping with McAllister’s previous work, human beings are noticeably absent from Weekend Getaways. This absence lends itself to the sometimes sinister, sometimes absurd quality of the work; the wide open spaces found in many of these images can appear riddled with loneliness. But like a blank canvas, they may also suggest hope and possibility. Although no human flesh is present, the signs of human existence dot the photos: tire tracks, foot prints in the snow, graffiti tags, a blurred face at the helm of a car.

There is also real beauty, even when it is punctuated by hints of poverty or the glare of advertising. Sometimes the beauty is the result of nature butting up against the titular vernacular architecture: trees appear to emerge from restaurants, or mirrored buildings reflect fluffy white clouds. There are surprising splashes of colour, too, particularly the brilliant blue skies, or brilliant red signage sandwiched between a cloudy sky and snowy ground.

Weekend Getaways, then, effectively situates sumptuously-shot parks and windswept landscapes as prime vacation spots that beckon to readers. The actual cities in which the photos were taken are incidental; the suburban landscape presented here piques the viewer’s curiosity, much as the glossy pages of a travelogue incite wanderlust. In doing so, however, it precisely throws into question the facet of suburban life that involves getting away from it all…at your local big-box store.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of McAllister’s work is its humour. The laughs his work generates come, in part, from the element of the unexpected: where we anticipate the presence of people, there are none; this startles us into laughter. Through McAllister’s lens, strip malls and tower blocks start to seem funny, but only because our everyday relationship to these ordinary structures is suddenly detached and distanced. In the manner of Freud’s theory of the uncanny, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. We see structures we think we know intimately and yet find ourselves removed from them. The humour, then, is without condescension; it comes not from being positioned above the material but apart from it. The laughs come through as a joke on us, we humans who built the structures that, separated from their everyday context, suddenly strike us as terribly absurd.

The images found in Weekend Getaways command readers’ attention by yielding themselves quietly and gradually. They invite readers to reflect on their own built environments and perhaps those of their childhood. After all, the generic flavour of the suburbs makes it easy for anyone to identify with abandoned fields, oddball retail outlets or vast parking lots dotted with vehicles. Neither apologia nor indictment, Weekend Getaways is a beautiful and surprising reconsideration of the suburbs whose time has come.

– Sabine Hikel, PhD.

Exhibition Dates

Titles
An Exhibtion of Artists’ Book Works
organized by the WayUpWayDown collective
23 June, 07- 8 September, 07.
Opening: Saturday, 23 June, 2007 from 2-5 pm
Balfour Books. 601 College Street, Toronto, ON M6G 1B5. 416-531-9911.
noon-11pm daily

Titles II
An Exhibtion of Artists’ Book Works
organized by the WayUpWayDown collective
Wednesday, October 24 – Sunday, November 25, 07
Opening: October 24 from 7-9 pm
Amherst Books
8 Main Street, Amherst, MA 01002 USA
413.256.1547 · 800.503.5865 · books@amherstbooks.com
Hours of Operation
Monday-Saturday: 6:30 A.M. — 9:00 P.M.
Sunday: 6:30 A.M. — 5:00 P.M

About

Out and About is an exhibition of emergent Canadian artists who are living or producing work in Europe, or produce work embodying notions of being ‘far from home’. Issues of displacement, identity and space binds together the work of these independent artists. This exhibition will encompass electro-acoustic composition, photography, painting, and contemporary video.

Introduction

Under the terms of the old sublime we went in awe of waterfalls and of volcanoes. Under the terms of the new we entertain an idea of infinity. Not so long ago we thought of ourselves as living in finite spaces, and amongst discrete items or things which came to hand. We had room for maneuver and we could make a difference within societies which we more or less understood. We expected that the public would be companionable at worst, and certainly explicable. Now, though, if you read along the lines of this exhibition of today’s artists the public has become indeterminate, a matter for conjecture. It may exist, with a coherent set of interests, but nothing of that can be taken for granted. And the public is important as a fundamental premise in art; for without such an idea we are left with solipsism.

Not that this withdrawal of the public is a matter for regret. Disappeared, it now haunts us as a possibility to be investigated even if not finally confirmed. What then can we know? Nothing fully, even if we are convinced of its existence. In this case we are forced to rely on indications and on ciphers, from the Arabic for zero for empty. The cipher introduces us to the possibility of meaning, even if it can never be finally ascertained. We enter the meaning paradigm in which, for instance, a set of sounds at regular intervals might invoke some idea of a universal substructure, or might just suggest the possibility of composition and closure. Under this same set of terms rough markings found on a wall might point to a history of previous uses, or just to contingency, which in itself carries with it the shadow of the purposive.

Think of these artists, in this case, as prospectors, investigating a boundless world newly opened up. It is as if they had come across it for the first time, even if forewarned and partially equipped. There is not only, they have been told, the possibility of meaning but the likely presence of other people who might be somehow understood… if watched and remarked on. Failing that you might ask them to act as you might expect them to act. One of the artists remarks on ‘feeling around in the dark for matches’, and this provisional attitude is evident in every case: investigative photography and video, radically experimental painting and sounds which just might reflect the music of the spheres, of which we have heard at third hand.

Note:
Emer O’Brien charts fragments of a very much wider world in her photographs of fragile enclosures on the edge of the great beyond.

It is Claire Greenshaw who deals in contingency, or in that causal and disordered quasi-history which gathers around her paintings.

Sunny Kerr refers to Adorno’s negative dialectics, as is the one who invents or makes things up, as if in response to the rumoured possibilities.

Chris Kline’s fragmentary proposals in paint suggest that they are excerpts from some much greater scheme of things, which can only be hinted at.

Andrew McAllister’s video’s function as soundings in the idea of a society which might be understood if it could only be held still for long enough.

Larissa Fassler reflects on the possibility of a public and of culture. ‘This is what it might be like’, she seems to suggest in her proposals.

It is Ian Stewart who has heard talk of the music of the spheres, and who perhaps wonders if these sounds might have some connection.

THE NEW SUBLIME.
RUMOURS OF THE INFINITE.

15 November 2003.
Ian Jeffrey.

Exhibition Dates

out and about in Toronto.
May 21st – May 30th, 2004.
Sis boom bah Gallery. 1114 Queen Street West.
Toronto, Canada. M6J 1H9

out and about in London.
December 3rd – December 13th, 2003.
Century Gallery. 1-15 Cremer Street.
Shoreditch. London, UK. E2 8HD.

123456►

Originally created as a set of 100 numbered 6×4 digital c-types for Bridge Magazine’s annual fundraising event, this full compilation was produced as a limited edition of four books hardcover and digitally printer, only one of which is still available for purchase. Hardcover bound in black cloth with foil blocked type.

123►

July 2003. Artist book. 68 digital prints, original photographs with maps.

Produced as a companion to the original video of the same name: Metamerism. The images in the book are of 34 of the locations videotaped around London and Dublin between November 2002 and May 2003, shot off the screen of a small professional video monitor. Produced in a limited edition of five books. Hardcover bound in black cloth with foil blocked type.