KOFFLER GALLERY OFF-SITE
how good are your dwelling places
Rita Bakacs, Susan Lakin, Ross Racine, Allen Topolski
Guest Curator: Cyril Reade
January 14 — March 14, 2010
23 Beverley Street, Toronto* (MAP)
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, January 14, 7 — 9 PM | Curator Talk at 7:30 PM
ARTIST TOUR WITH ALLEN TOPOLSKI: Thursday, February 18, at 7 PM, FREE.
REGULAR GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday to Sunday 12 – 6 PM | Friday closed at 4 PM | Closed Monday, statutory and Jewish holidays | Admission is FREE and open to the public
"Must-See Show" — NOW Magazine, January 14, 2010
Developed for the Koffler Gallery by guest curator Cyril Reade and presented in a former residential space, this exhibition brings together four artists who come from diverse cultural backgrounds and work in a variety of media. In their respective practices, Rita Bakacs, Susan Lakin, Ross Racine and Allen Topolski often examine architectural and domestic environments, attempting to decode cultural specificity within a homogenizing context. Although not Jewish, the artists were invited to reflect on the fluidity of Jewish identity in North America, taking as departure points the shared experiences of community, individuality, displacement, continuity and assimilation to examine connections and differences.
The home is located at the heart of Jewish life, where daily ritual for the observant or the annual celebration of holidays transforms the domestic in symbolic ways. Often, however, very little distinguishes a Jewish neighbourhood from other developments in the same North American city, except for institutional buildings and commercial signage. This exhibition does not ask what the Jewish home might look like, given the impossibility of defining a monolithic group identity. Instead, the works attempt to trace cultural characteristics within a unifying context, using the home, figuratively speaking, as a screen.
Berlin-based Hungarian filmmaker Rita Bakacs takes us to the European origins of many North American Jews with a new video piece about the Schloss Börnicke, a former residence of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family situated in a Berlin suburb. The magnificent estate hosted cultural soirées, marking a history representative of the German Jewry’s contribution to European culture. Bakacs’ camera records the building’s current fragile state, echoing its tumultuous past resounding with the sometimes forced, sometimes voluntary migration of peoples. (Click here to download Rita Bakacs' artist statement)
Large waves of Jewish immigrants, entering North America with other Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century first settled in downtown areas. After Word War II, their children and subsequent generations participated in the migration to the suburbs, seeking an idealized, healthier environment. New York-based artist Ross Racine digitally renders bird’s eye views of suburban tracts, orderly and prosperous at first glance. The suggestive titles and formal aspects of these imaginary developments shape our perception of the subdivisions, revealing limited choice and lack of ecological responsibility. (Click here to download Ross Racine's artist statement)
Rochester photographer Susan Lakin leads us inside the home where she takes portraits of the inhabitants as a reflection in one of North America’s ubiquitous appliances, the television screen. Surrounding the television, the owners’ belongings become a cipher of the subjects’ interests, occasionally signaling a Jewish identity, though more often remaining indistinguishable from those of their neighbours, Jewish or otherwise, reflecting a North American lifestyle. (Click here to download Susan Lakin's artist statement)
Finally, sculptor Allen Topolski transforms found domestic items, marrying the familiar and the uncanny to render them into humorously strange objects. Moving with his family into a suburban Rochester house that was formerly occupied by a Jewish family, Topolski discovered many artifacts left behind that spurred him to create works alluding to the former owners’ heritage and tastes. (Click here to download Allen Topolski's artist statement)
The exhibition is installed in a house on Beverley Street, a couple of doors up from the childhood home of the architect Frank Gehry, born Ephraim Owen Goldberg, who recently renovated the Art Gallery of Ontario, around the corner. The row of buildings is slated for demolition and redevelopment; the inhabitants of the early twentieth century have long gone, now to be replaced by yet other residents. The works temporarily gathered in this space give a snapshot of one of the many trajectories of North American city dwellers.
* Please note that the exhibition is located in a vacant commercial space. There are no washrooms or amenities available in the building.
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Cyril Reade is Associate Professor of Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His book Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin was published by Peter Lang AG in 2007. Reade is currently working on The Mendelssohns in Berlin: Portrait of a Family. He recently participated in the Koffler’s The Wrecking Ball, and was guest curator for the Gallery’s 2005 exhibition NXT.Message.
Rita Bakacs was born in Tatabánya, Hungary in 1976 and moved to Germany with her family at the age of 10. She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Cologne, Germany and the University of Rochester, NY. After completing her MA she worked for several film and television production companies in Los Angeles and Berlin where she has been based since 2002. Since 2006 she has been concentrating on independent work as a filmmaker and video artist. With her first documentary video Wohnkomplex BRD (Residential Complex) she has received the Audience Award at the Leipzig Documentary Short Film Festival. Rita is now finishing a feature length personal documentary project about migration. Since 2008 she has been taking part in a “Master Class Documentary“ taught by distinguished German documentary filmmaker Andres Veiel. In 2008 and 2009 she has received work stipends from the ZEIT foundation, the Rosa Luxemburg foundation and the Foundation for Human Dignity and Labour.
Susan Lakin is Associate Professor of Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY. Before arriving to RIT, Susan worked commercially in Los Angeles and Australia; some of her clients included Adidas, Avon, Harper's Bazaar, LA Times Magazine, Nordstrom, OCA Architects, Sebastian, Shape Magazine, Southern California Edison, and Syncor International Corp. In addition to her commercial work, she owned and operated a professional retail photographic supply store in Burbank, CA. In her current artwork she is examining our interaction with mass communication through electronic screens in our homes and looking at how these displays frame our lives. Her artwork has received many awards and is part of the permanent collection at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Oakland Museum of California. Her exhibitions include: New York at the Memorial Art Gallery, Gallery @49 NYC, Germany at the Fotografie Forum International, Texas at Houston Center of Photography, Boston at the Photographic Resource Center and the Griffin Museum of Photography, California at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University Art Museum Santa Barbara, as well as, the Robert V Fullerton Art Museum. http://www.susanlakin.com/
Ross Racine, born in Montreal (Quebec), Canada, lives and works in New York City. Racine's works are drawn freehand on a computer; no photographs or scans are used in the process. These drawings of aerial views use the distant, perpendicular mode of viewing for its reflective capabilities, as a way of thinking about design, the city and society in general. His prints have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Europe, most recently at Drexel University (Philadelphia), the Front Room Gallery (New York), the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, the International Print Triennial (Katowice, Poland), the International Print Center (New York), and Like The Spice Gallery (New York). His work is in several collections, including the Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, Iowa), the Johnson & Johnson collection (New Brunswick, New Jersey), and the Hallmark collection (Kansas City, Missouri). Racine's art has been rewarded by several grants from the Canada Council. http://www.rossracine.com/
Allen C. Topolski is a practicing artist, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. He teaches a variety of interdisciplinary courses. Topolski was raised in the coal region of central Pennsylvania. He was formally trained in painting and later realized the importance of artifacts from his post-industrial childhood town - they prompted the investigations of nostalgia and domesticity that dominate his work today. Topolski received his BA from Bucknell University and his MFA in 1990 from Penn State University. Topolski has a national exhibition record and is currently involved in a number of public art initiatives in the city of Rochester.
http://www.rochester.edu/College/AAH/people/topolski/index.html
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Koffler Gallery is generously supported by:
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| Location: | Koffler Gallery Off-Site, 23 Beverley Street |