Gone are the days when going to an art exhibition necessarily meant walking through white-walled, high-ceilinged galleries, as you were guided through a labyrinth of ’70s carpeting by your $10 audio tour headset. While the creative impulse to produce art is as old as humanity itself, ways to creatively exhibit art are newly emerging. The Toronto Alternative Art Fair International (TAAFI) is evidence of a new trend of exhibiting art that directly challenges the dusty-paintings-on-a-wall exhibit.
TAAFI’s sponsors range from the City of Toronto’s Arts Council to the Art Gallery of York University, to magazines such as C and Mix-a diversity that also reflects the nature of the fair’s participants. Appropriately hosted by the Drake Hotel and the Gladstone Hotel, the fair represents Toronto’s first attempt to weave together the efforts of over 30 individual artists, curators, local and international galleries and not-for-profit art institutions in the form of photography exhibits, sculpture, video installations, panel discussions and music performances.
In direct contrast to the muffled silence of traditional art galleries, walking through the Drake is a plunge into a full sensory experience, partially thanks to the setting. The individual installations are set up in the Drake’s hotel rooms, complete with their matching towel sets and tucked-in sheets. One can’t help but feel a heightened awareness and silly caution upon entering what still wholly looks like… a bedroom.
Artists prop themselves on rims of bathtubs, their artwork lined up on the bathroom tiles. In room 203, Drake artist-in-residence Janieta Eyre has adopted the theme of her installation to this setting, and the unmade bed in the middle of the room is as much a part of the exhibit as is the stunning 30×40 black and white photograph hung above it.
Room 204 is the site of Jessica Rose and Malcolm Brown’s installation, a mix of Brown’s personal and political slogan paintings, and Rose’s video commentary on love and domesticity. A striking aspect of Rose and Brown’s project is “The 100-hour Box-in”-the artists’ refusal to leave their room for the duration of 100 hours, even for food. When I bring them bagels, Brown says, “Thank you! Now you’re invited to be a part of my next painting experience, even if you contribute one brush-stroke.” Food for art.
On another hotel bed, I encounter Toronto artist Max Streicher’s oversized lightweight polyethylene cloth figures, which wheeze into a kind of surrogate life as little fans inflate them from the inside.
At the Gladstone, there is a bedroom fully dedicated to the display of male underwear. Artist Matthias Herrmann says the installation explores “changes in public appearance of the male body without refraining from the hysterical or the ridiculous.” Meanwhile, next door to the superfluous displays of boxer-briefs, there are panel discussions questioning the existence of the avant-garde, and the current state of Feminism in art.
By harmoniously blending seemingly incongruous creative experiences, TAAFI convinces that art deserves its own unbridled universe, and sets a milestone in its creation.
The Toronto Alternative Art Fair International runs until October 4. For more information, see www.taafi.org.
