MIXEDFIT

FREE CONTEMPORARY ART BUS TOUR
Sunday, October 17, 11:30 AM – 5:30 PM | Tour the Koffler Gallery Off-Site project (711 Queen St. W) then visit the Blackwood Gallery, AGYU, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the University of Toronto Arts Centre. RSVP 905.828.3789 or blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca

LATE NIGHT T-TIME
Saturday, October 2, 8 PM – 3 AM | Balisi, 711 Queen St W | At this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Rotterdam-based artist Stefan Hoffmann makes art on the spot with on-site screen printing into the night. Bring your T-shirt and have it transformed into your very own wearable work of art!

ONE WORLD, DOUBLE TAKE
Sunday, November 14 | A panel moderated by scholar-in-residence David Shneer looks at cultures and creators who cross boundaries – geographic, societal and artistic. Full details coming soon.

Download the exhibition brochure here (PDF)

Bearing a written message, an iconic image, a familiar or an eccentric brand, the T-shirt makes a statement, expressing individual choice in creating a personal image. As a basic clothing item, the T-shirt has become one of the most ubiquitous identity-defining elements. Five Canadian and international artists are invited by the Koffler Gallery to explore notions of displacement between cultures and identities, designing limited edition silkscreen-based T-shirts to be disseminated through several Toronto stores. The project is presented in conjunction with Printopolis, an international symposium organized by Canada’s leading printmaking centre, Open Studio, in celebration of its 40th Anniversary.

Exploring the T-shirt as a medium for communication, Millie Chen, Emelie Chhangur, Hannah Claus, Stefan Hoffmann and Dan Perjovschi engage with issues of race, gender, immigration and social justice. Based in Ridgeway, Ontario, Millie Chen delves into her Chinese heritage, reinterpreting the motifs of Chinoiserie wallpaper and disrupting the fictional Chinese idyllic scenes as projections of European desire. With a text-based T-shirt design, Toronto artist Emelie Chhangur addresses inter-racial relationships and the history of discrimination practiced against those of mixed racial identity.

Montreal artist Hannah Claus manipulates decorative patterns to explore the intersection of her two cultural identities, Native and European-Canadian, searching for a new language that reveals a poignant absence. Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, who gained international recognition for his shrewd political cartoons that explore global events, contributes a T-shirt that comments on the immigrant condition and the inherent dislocation of individual identity.

Rotterdam-based Stefan Hoffmann is the featured artist invited by Open Studio in conjunction with Printopolis. Hoffman creates work that ranges from site-specific wall and window interventions to object-based multiples, using silkscreen to layer images drawn from pictograms, urban signage, medical illustrations, and old heraldry books with visual elements derived on location. In a public event at Balisi on Queen Street West during Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2010, Hoffmann will transfer his images to T-shirts brought in by the public. Creating an original piece for each participant, the artist re-emphasizes the democratic essence of this popular clothing item. In addition, Hoffmann will intervene on the storefront window and walls, developing imagery derived from the local urban context to highlight the MIXEDFIT project.

Image: Dan Perjovschi, immigrant, 2010.

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LOCATIONS & HOURS

Balisi | 711 Queen Street West
Hours: Sunday 11 AM – 6 PM | Monday – Thursday 11 AM – 9 PM | Friday and Saturday 10 AM – 9 PM

Balisi | 668 College Street
Hours: Sunday 11 AM – 6 PM | Monday – Saturday 10 AM – 9 PM

Balisi | 439 Danforth Avenue
Hours: Sunday 11 AM – 6 PM | Monday – Saturday 10 AM – 9 PM

Balisi | 2507 Yonge Street
Hours: Sunday 11 AM – 6 PM | Monday – Thursday 10 AM – 8 PM | Friday and Saturday 10 AM – 9 PM

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Koffler Gallery is generously supported by:







     


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ARTIST BIOS
Millie Chen’s installations, videos, and interventions are intended as sensorial experiences that prod the perceptual and ideological assumptions of the audience. She has shown her work across Canada, the U.S., China and in Mexico, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, and Japan. Recently, she showed as part of Sound Symposium, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Toronto nuit blanche, Reverberation: 2008 International Video Art Exhibition at Yuangong Art Museum, Shanghai, FILE-Rio 2007: Electronic Language International Festival, Rio de Janeiro, and in concurrent solo exhibitions in France at the Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie and Centre cultural canadien, Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Chalmers Fellowship through the Ontario Arts Council. Chen’s work is in several public collections and she has produced a number of major permanent public art commissions. Her writing has appeared in publications in the U.K., Canada and the U.S. She is Chair and Associate Professor at the Department of Visual Studies, University at Buffalo, SUNY. www.milliechen.com

Emelie Chhangur is a Toronto-based artist, cultural worker, and curator. Maintaining a process-based, collaborative approach to working with artists, her recent curatorial research and practice finds its relevant context in Latin America. As an artist, her position as Assistant Director, Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) is instrumental in transforming the nature of the contemporary art institution and the role of the university art gallery in relation to its academic context and its social function within an arts community. Her single channel videos have been shown nationally and internationally and her sculpture/installation work was most recently shown in Dyed Roots: The new emergence of Culture at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto and upcoming at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, Ontario in 2011.

Hannah Claus creates installations that are intended to subtly provoke a re-thinking of boundaries and borders of cultural, historical and personal associations. In so doing, Claus questions the role and nature of memory. Through process-based strategies, such as repetition and accumulation, she utilizes pattern in her work as a signifier of language, culture, and a desire for communication. Over the past ten years, Claus has participated in exhibitions throughout Canada, including the group exhibition Au fil de mes jours / In My Lifetime (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Québec City, Québec, 2004 / Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Québec (2007) and the touring exhibition Oh So Iroquois, (Ottawa Art Gallery, 2007). She is a graduate from Concordia University in Montreal (MFA, 2004) and Ontario College of Art and Design (AOCAD, 1997). Her upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in October 2010. She lives and works in Montréal, Québec.

Stefan Hoffmann is a German-born screen print artist who lives and works in Rotterdam and Cologne. He uses print processes to create site-specific wall and window works that reflect the energy and function of the spaces they inhabit. Drawing upon imagery including pictograms, medical illustrations and 17th century emblem books, he incorporates visual elements found around the working location. Hoffman has been involved in numerous projects in Europe and North America over the past years, including the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) Rotterdam, Motorenhalle, Dresden, Artist Image Resource (AIR), Pittsburgh, PA, Phoenix Brighton, UK. http://stefanhoffmann.nl/

Dan Perjovschi is a visual artist mixing drawing, cartoon and graffiti in artistic pieces drawn directly on the walls of museums and contemporary art spaces all over the world. His drawings comment on current political, social or cultural issues. He has played an active role in the development of the civil society in Romania, through his editorial activity with Revista 22 cultural magazine in Bucharest, and has stimulated exchange between the Romanian and international contemporary artistic scenes. Perjovschi’s solo international exhibitions include the San Francisco Institute of the Arts, Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ulm Kunstverein, KIASMA, Helsinki, MoMa, New York, Basel Kunsthalle, Tate Modern, London, Portikus, Frankfurt, Ludwig Museum, Koln, and the Romanian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennial (with SubReal). He has also exhibited in numerous group shows, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Lodz Biennial, Hamburg Kunstverein, and the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis. Perjovschi lives and works in Bucharest. www.perjovschi.ro