Image via Complex Original
With a population of over 2.6 million, Toronto is often cited as the largest and most multicultural city in Canada. Toronto is home to many established institutions—the Art Gallery of Ontario, MOCCA, and the Royal Ontario Museum—as well as a younger generation of galleries like Power Plant and Tomorrow Gallery. These organizations have created a haven for artists in the past few years by showing and supporting local work, while connecting Toronto's art to an international dialogue. The Ontario College of Art & Design lies at the center of downtown Toronto, funneling a vibrant community of emerging artists into the city’s flourishing art scene. These Toronto-Based Visual Artists You Should Know represent a sampling of this Canadian community’s diverse group of cultural creators at various points in their career and artistic development, from legendary figures from the art-historical canon like 83-year-old Michael Snow to exciting recent graduates like Mike Goldby and Georgia Dickie.
RELATED: 25 Artists to Watch in 2013
RELATED: 20 Incredible Artists Using Neon
Jeremy Jansen
Age: 34
Medium: sculpture, photography
Jeremy Jansen was born in Calgary, Alberta and lives and works in Toronto. Jansen studied photography at the Langara College of Art in Vancouver. His work is often concerned with the deconstruction of urban environments. His art has been in solo exhibits at Cooper Cole, Toronto and La Miroiterie, Paris. Jansen's work is currently on view in the group exhibition curated by Micah Lexier at The Power Plant, Toronto entitled "More Than Two (Let It Make Itself)".
Hugh Scott-Douglas
Age: 25
Medium: sculpture, photography,
Hugh Scott-Douglas was born in Cambridge, England and lives in Toronto. His work refers to processes of experimentation, production, and consumption through the visual language of minimalism. He co-founded Tomorrow Gallery with Tara Downs and Aleksander Hardashnakov. Scott-Douglas had a solo show at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles this past January and was included in "Pattern: Follow the Rules" at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in Michigan.
Abby McGuane
Age: 27
Medium: mixed media, sculpture, collage
Abby McGuane has been in group exhibitions at the Power Plant and The Kitchen and in solo shows at O'Born Contemporary and the Howard Park Institute. Many of her pieces fuse raw materials with images that have been partially manipulated and transformed. In this way, McGuane's work negotiates the boundaries between sculptural and pictorial concerns, confounding distinctions between the image and the frame. She often scratches and distresses the surface of the image, making the materiality of the image clearer while making the frame appear more fragile.
Eldon Garnet
Age: 67
Medium: photography, sculpture, public art
Eldon Garnet is a multidisciplinary artist and professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. He edited Impulse, a Canadian art and culture magazine, from 1975-1990. His work is held at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the National Gallery of Canada, among other institutions. He has authored a number of fiction novels, including Lost Between the Edges (2007) which was published by Semiotext(e).
Barbara Astman
Age: 63
Medium: photo-based
Barbara Astman's work explores ideations of identity and systems of representations. She was one of the first artists to utilize Polaroids in her work, distorting and manipulating the surface of the print. Astman often scratches, enlarges, or prints over her images, further distancing her photography from the document and emphasizing its identity as an art object. Her work is held in numerous institutions, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and the International Museum of Photography.
Mike Goldby
Age: 22
Medium: integrated media
Mike Goldby studied integrated media at OCAD. He had his first solo exhibit, "Premier Life" at Tomorrow Gallery this past February. Goldby's work at Tomorrow Gallery explored the structure of social networks and how their self-imaging strategies can be co-opted for self-branding. His interest in the machinations of contemporary identity construction and the intangible consequences of algorithmic reality makes this recent graduate's work particularly interesting.
Roula Partheniou
Age: 33
Medium: painting, sculpture, photography
Roula Partheniou creates menageries of minimal objects to make a sense of incomplete association between unidentifiable fragments. Partheniou is interested in the principle of Gestalt in the double take. Through materially shifting replicas, the familiar becomes alien, causing the viewer to reconsider common forms and assumptions. Partheniou has upcoming exhibits in 2014 at both the Temporary Contemporary in Oakville and MKG127 in Toronto.
Vanessa Maltese
Age: 24
Medium: painting, sculpture
Vanessa Maltese won the RBC Painting prize in 2012. Her paintings and sculptures acknowledge and play with the spatial boundaries of the gallery as well as the frame. Similarly, her sculptures seem to come out of her paintings. Vibrant colors and Tuttle-like forms dominate this young artist's oeuvre.
Georgia Dickie
Age: 24
Medium: Sculpture
Georgia Dickie graduated with a BFA from OCAD in 2011. She has had exhibits at Battat Contemporary, Oakville Galleries, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Her sculptures are constructed of found objects that the artist has gathered from various sources. Through creating an inventory of amassed objects and reconfiguring them in the reality of physical space, Dickie redefines the object in a new visual proposition, confirming the anonymity and subsequent potentiality of identity and meaning in a post-internet schema.
Brendan Fernandes
Age: 34
Medium: performance, video, dance, sculpture
Brendan Fernandes was born in Nairobi and immigrated to Canada in the 1990s. His background as a Kenyan-Indian-Canadian gives him a distinct perpetually shifting perspective that influences his artwork's exploration of identity as enacted rather than static. Fernandes has had exhibits at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Guggenheim Museum, and Art in General. In 2012, Fernandes was included in MASS MoCA's "Oh, Canada" exhibit.
Meredith Nickie
Age: 34
Medium: sculpture, installation, photography
Meredith Nickie lives and works in Toronto and New York. She graduated from the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in 2009. Her multidisciplinary work challenges conventional conceptions of taste, race, class, and progress that have been shaped through cultural representations. Her work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including PS122, IDEA Space, Vox Populi Gallery, Artspace, and The John and June Allcott Gallery.
Sean Martindale
Age: unknown
Medium: print, radio, film, installation, design
Sean Martindale's work playfully encourages people to engage with their public environment, highlighting social and ecological issues. He explores alternate possibilities for existing urbanity, such as his piece Grass Spills for "Outside the Planter Boxes," where Martindale arranged sod to make it appear as if grass was spilling out of the city's cracked and broken planters. He frequently uses salvaged goods and live plants. Martindale was recently awarded the Chalmers Arts Fellowship by the Ontario Arts Council.
Johanna Householder
Age: 58
Medium: performance, video
Johanna Householder was a member of The Clichettes, a feminist performance group, in the 1980s. She has been making performances and video works since the 1970s. She co-founded 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, teaches at OCAD University, and has written extensively on the history of Canadian performance art. Among other places, Householder has performed at M:ST in Calgary, Alberta, Live in Guangzhou, China, and LiveAction in Göteborg, Sweden.
John Massey
Age: 63
Medium: sculpture, installation, photography
John Massey is an artist who became known for his sculptural and installation works in the early 1980s. Recent work of Massey's has been primarily photo-based. Massey's photography often blurs the perceived reality of the depicted scene with humorous and uncanny interventions. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Michael Snow
Age: 83
Medium: painting, sculpture, film, musician, author
Michael Snow is a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, and all around living legend. Snow's film Wavelength (1967) is a structuralist epic organized around the tension of a 45-minute-long zoom. He has been awarded numerous honors, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Order of Canada. He has an upcoming exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art entitled "Michael Snow: Photo-Centric," February 1 – April 27, 2014.