YYZ World Tour
YYZ World Tour Poster (1986)
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YYZ World Tour was a 1986 group exhibition at the Embassy Cultural House organized by members of Toronto’s YYZ Artists Outlet. YYZ was started in 1979 by a group of recent graduates from OCAD University, known then as the Ontario College of Art. Toronto in the 1980s saw YYZ alongside many other artists’ collectives, co-operatives and small galleries spring up near the intersection of Spadina Avenue and Queen Street West. The area was populated mainly by clothing manufacturers, fabric outlets and jobbers. ‘Outlet’ in the gallery’s name was a cheeky wink to the neighbourhood demographics.
It was an era of expansion for the arts, with generous funding available from the Canada Council for the Arts as well as provincial and municipal organizations. In addition, the emergence of artist-run centres in cities across the country allowed for the presentation of major, multi-venue exhibitions. Flexibility, experimentation, and cooperation defined the artist-run network, and this attitude gave rise to artistic production not possible in larger public and private art galleries. YYZ flourished under these conditions presenting “Monumenta”, a riff on Documenta, in 1982. The exhibition, featuring artists working in a diverse range of media, was shown across all centres in the neighbourhood and a highlight of the year. “The New City of Sculpture” followed in 1984 with a curatorial essay included in the recently established “C Magazine.” Another notable exhibition, “The Interpretation of Architecture” from 1986, looked at the overlapping worlds of art and architecture. Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner were good friends of the artist members of YYZ and would often travel from London to visit the exhibitions. Janice Gurney was a member of the board of both YYZ and the Embassy Cultural and had participated in a number of the ECH projects. When the idea was proposed that YYZ Artists’ Outlet’s board of directors show their current work at the Embassy Cultural House in spring 1986 a quick meeting was followed by an immediate agreement to participate. It was a busy time as YYZ was in the process of moving spaces. Despite the ongoing relocation the group of 16 brought a range of work including drawing, painting, sculpture, and film to the Embassy Cultural House. YYZ Artists’ Outlet continues its work and legacy in the present day, operating out of the 401 Richmond Building. You can check out their current activities here. Co-ordinators for this online exhibition/archival project are Andreas Buchwaldt and Jennifer Rudder. Featured Artists:
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Selected Works from the Exhibition
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Memories from the Participants
Elizabeth Mackenzie:
“In the 1980s, I created room-sized installations by drawing directly on gallery walls (as I did for my contribution to the YYZ World Tour in 1986). The images were based on photographic references and utilized projected images for rendering the large-scale wall drawings. This movement between the reference, the hand-drawn image, the projected image, and the bodily gestures required to produce the wall drawings was (and continues to be) of great interest to me. Something is both lost and gained in these translations."
Janice Gurney on “Harvest":
“The image of a horse being slaughtered is taken from Georges Franju’s first film, the documentary Blood of the Beasts (1949). The white brush marks on red plexi are copied from a found painting of a harvest scene. I met Greg Curnoe a year before the YYZ World Tour exhibition. I remember being so surprised and happy that when he saw Harvest, he asked if he could buy it! And sadly for me, it had already been sold to someone else."
Stan Denniston:
“What I was trying to create was this: sometimes the story of what was happening (to me) at the moment of the making of the image was more important, more interesting, than the image. The text is the story of what was happening outside of the view of the camera. So that obscuring text, screen-printed on the acrylic in front of the photograph, has to be peered-through—it's the story 'behind' the making of the image. These are the only two pieces from this series that were ever finished but they led to the Critical Fictions, and the Personal Fictions of the 90's."
Rebecca Garrett:
“Rude Alteration is a group of photo collages on canvas that include Bad Manners, If I Were You, Girl Asleep, Real & Imagined Love, Any Place But Here, and Why She Died. The collages use photographs roughly attached onto images of well-known European paintings, causing a clash in the reading of the juxtaposed media. When the two disparate images are intentionally combined in this way it foregrounds their dis-junction and highlights the juxtaposition. {The} works are on canvas because they refer and gesture to the history of representation in painting, and want to disrupt the way figure and ground are read."
Real & Imagined Love, shown at the Embassy Cultural House in the YYZ World tour in 1986, features the bottom half of Edouard Manet’s 1866 painting, “The Fifer,” Musée d’Orsay, with an early photograph of the head and chest of a nude woman attached to the top of the image, eclipsing the face of the young military musician."
David Clarkson:
“I recently saw the images from the YYZ Embassy Cultural House show after thirty years, and could tell it occurred at a key moment for me. What is clear in the images was less clear in my recollection and I was surprised to see two types of my work included in the show I thought had never be shown in tandem: in the backroom, I had a small sculptural wall work — ‘a statue with a painting’ type object — made earlier in the ‘80s; in the front room, on the wall between jukebox and bar, were two drawings. These were new at that time and I was keen to show how they pursued more contemporary visual signs, their exchange and ambiguity, without the gratuitous materiality or intentional falsity of my earlier sculptures.
I wanted to visit London; as a teenager in Ottawa Pierre Theberg’s curation at the National Gallery had left a big impression on me. He often featured work from London by Martin, Favro, Ewen, Curnoe, Redinger, and Zelenak. I was left with a desire to one day visit this mythical Forest City, hamlet of avant art activity, so I was delighted to eventually meet a terrific bunch of artists there — Jamelie Hassan, Ron Benner, Kim Moodie, Irene Xanthos, Gerard Pas, Wyn Geleynse, Jayce Salloum, Robert Fones, and others.
As I wrote this about my visit to the Embassy, I ran into a small problem. I have a couple of strong and undeniable visual memories: at the venue, drinking at the bar beside my drawings, sitting there talking, a large plant over my shoulder — at the opening I guess. Now all this is fine — and then there are two more memories which I cannot reconcile.
The first is waking with an extraordinary hangover at Ron and Jamelie’s on a brilliant Sunday winter morning, then my headache miraculously cured on my absolutely freezing, subzero walk to get cigarettes. Amen! The second memory is incongruously from a warm summer day and evening on a beach — a bbq, a bonfire — with the YYZ gang and our London pals. I’m not sure which of these two memories is from the weekend associated with the exhibition. Maybe it doesn’t matter, all my memories of visiting London are similar: lots of drinks, youthful conversation and a markedly communal spirit."
“In the 1980s, I created room-sized installations by drawing directly on gallery walls (as I did for my contribution to the YYZ World Tour in 1986). The images were based on photographic references and utilized projected images for rendering the large-scale wall drawings. This movement between the reference, the hand-drawn image, the projected image, and the bodily gestures required to produce the wall drawings was (and continues to be) of great interest to me. Something is both lost and gained in these translations."
Janice Gurney on “Harvest":
“The image of a horse being slaughtered is taken from Georges Franju’s first film, the documentary Blood of the Beasts (1949). The white brush marks on red plexi are copied from a found painting of a harvest scene. I met Greg Curnoe a year before the YYZ World Tour exhibition. I remember being so surprised and happy that when he saw Harvest, he asked if he could buy it! And sadly for me, it had already been sold to someone else."
Stan Denniston:
“What I was trying to create was this: sometimes the story of what was happening (to me) at the moment of the making of the image was more important, more interesting, than the image. The text is the story of what was happening outside of the view of the camera. So that obscuring text, screen-printed on the acrylic in front of the photograph, has to be peered-through—it's the story 'behind' the making of the image. These are the only two pieces from this series that were ever finished but they led to the Critical Fictions, and the Personal Fictions of the 90's."
Rebecca Garrett:
“Rude Alteration is a group of photo collages on canvas that include Bad Manners, If I Were You, Girl Asleep, Real & Imagined Love, Any Place But Here, and Why She Died. The collages use photographs roughly attached onto images of well-known European paintings, causing a clash in the reading of the juxtaposed media. When the two disparate images are intentionally combined in this way it foregrounds their dis-junction and highlights the juxtaposition. {The} works are on canvas because they refer and gesture to the history of representation in painting, and want to disrupt the way figure and ground are read."
Real & Imagined Love, shown at the Embassy Cultural House in the YYZ World tour in 1986, features the bottom half of Edouard Manet’s 1866 painting, “The Fifer,” Musée d’Orsay, with an early photograph of the head and chest of a nude woman attached to the top of the image, eclipsing the face of the young military musician."
David Clarkson:
“I recently saw the images from the YYZ Embassy Cultural House show after thirty years, and could tell it occurred at a key moment for me. What is clear in the images was less clear in my recollection and I was surprised to see two types of my work included in the show I thought had never be shown in tandem: in the backroom, I had a small sculptural wall work — ‘a statue with a painting’ type object — made earlier in the ‘80s; in the front room, on the wall between jukebox and bar, were two drawings. These were new at that time and I was keen to show how they pursued more contemporary visual signs, their exchange and ambiguity, without the gratuitous materiality or intentional falsity of my earlier sculptures.
I wanted to visit London; as a teenager in Ottawa Pierre Theberg’s curation at the National Gallery had left a big impression on me. He often featured work from London by Martin, Favro, Ewen, Curnoe, Redinger, and Zelenak. I was left with a desire to one day visit this mythical Forest City, hamlet of avant art activity, so I was delighted to eventually meet a terrific bunch of artists there — Jamelie Hassan, Ron Benner, Kim Moodie, Irene Xanthos, Gerard Pas, Wyn Geleynse, Jayce Salloum, Robert Fones, and others.
As I wrote this about my visit to the Embassy, I ran into a small problem. I have a couple of strong and undeniable visual memories: at the venue, drinking at the bar beside my drawings, sitting there talking, a large plant over my shoulder — at the opening I guess. Now all this is fine — and then there are two more memories which I cannot reconcile.
The first is waking with an extraordinary hangover at Ron and Jamelie’s on a brilliant Sunday winter morning, then my headache miraculously cured on my absolutely freezing, subzero walk to get cigarettes. Amen! The second memory is incongruously from a warm summer day and evening on a beach — a bbq, a bonfire — with the YYZ gang and our London pals. I’m not sure which of these two memories is from the weekend associated with the exhibition. Maybe it doesn’t matter, all my memories of visiting London are similar: lots of drinks, youthful conversation and a markedly communal spirit."
