EXHIBITION | 31 May – 05 July 2019
OPENING RECEPTION | Friday 31 May, 8:00 p.m.
ARTIST TALK | Friday 31 May, 7:00 p.m.
PLATFORM centre is pleased to announce The View from Here, a solo exhibition featuring the photographic work of Luis Jacob (ON). The show runs from 31 May – 05 July, 2019 with an opening reception scheduled for Friday 31 May at 8PM. Jacob will give an artist talk at 7PM on 31 May. Both events are free and open to the public.
“Fifty years ago, Jane Jacobs described Toronto as a place divided. “Toronto has a split personality,” she said, “a civic schizophrenia. On the one level, there is the spirit of individuals and small groups who do things — what one might call the vernacular spirit. This is all very informal, ingenious, quite romantic and full of fun. It seems to me that the official spirit of Toronto is to stamp out fun: pompous, impressed with mediocrity if it is very, very big and expensive.”
More recently, in 2010, Dionne Brand also portrayed a place at odds with itself. “I find Toronto in a standoff,” she wrote, “the standoff between those who run it and those who live in it. There is a failure of those who rule to truly acknowledge those who live in the city as anything more than the projections of their own fears… There is a city here waiting to be imagined.”
My exhibition is an attempt to imagine Toronto — a city perhaps more often feared than loved. Photographs of its downtown streets reveal a place simultaneously negotiating its ongoing erasure dictated by powers-that-be, and a city deftly recreating itself on the basis of its own proliferating diversity. Bending the gaze away from official landmarks, Toronto becomes a city best depicted by looking past it, in the wrong direction.” – Luis Jacob
About the Artist
Luis Jacob lives in Toronto, Canada. Working as artist, curator, and writer, his diverse practice invites a collision of meanings that destabilizes conventions of viewing, and opens possibilities for a renewed experience of the world around us.
He has achieved an international reputation, with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Bolzano, Italy (2017); Montreal Biennial 2016; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); Taipei Biennial, and Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (both 2012); Generali Foundation, Vienna (both 2011); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (both 2010); Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009); Hamburg Kunstverein and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (both 2008); and documenta12, Kassel (2007).
In 2015 he co-curated the conference This is Paradise: Art and Artists in Toronto with Barbara Fischer, in collaboration with Kitty Scott; and in 2016 he curated the exhibition Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
