Titles invites a number of artists, architects and designers to produce book works or related artworks in a bookstore. The participants will either choose an existing book title or create a new title to work on. The criterion is that the form and content of the artistic work should have a relation to the chosen title; it must be found under a category in the bookstore (i.e., literature, children’s books, art, etc.) and placed in a slot on the shelf according to alphabetical ordering. A list will be provided to the visitors to locate the works.
The structure of Titles is designed to adapt and travel to other bookstores in different cities. New participants, especially those living in the city of the exhibition, will be invited with each new exhibition. The first exhibition of Titles will open on June 23, 2007 at Balfour Books in Toronto, and will run until September 8, 2007. It will travel to London, Ontario and Montreal in the fall of 2007.
This project reflects the “curatorial” interest of the WayUpWayDown collective (Sunny Kerr, Yam Lau, Tania Ursomarzo) to set into motion itinerant exhibition structures and manoeuvres. It is the mandate of the collective to facilitate tenuous and fluid relations between exhibitions, artworks and communities. The invitations to participants are extended on the basis of respect, which already entailed artistic merits, friendship and trust. Hence, the curatorial injunction is reduced to the existing categories of the bookstore. A related project using Yam Lau’s car as a mobile project space will be implemented in the fall of 2007.
The artists involved are: Klaudia Biala, Flavio Trevisan, Juro Osawa, Tania Ursomarzo, Yvonne Singer, Stephanie Chabot, Marcin Kedzior, Gordon Lebredt, Yam Lau, Mary Porter, Janice Gurney, Cheryl Sourkes, Lorna Mills, Scott Sorli, Rachele Riley, Andy Patton, Evan Quigley, Paulette Phillips, Michael Maranda, David Scott Armstrong, Becky Singleton, Barbara Balfour, Stephanie Shepherd, Sandra Rechico, Andrew McAllister, Craig Rodmore, Sunny Kerr, and Alex Xie.
The exhibition opening takes place on Saturday, June 23, 2007 from 2:00-5:00 pm. Balfour Books is located at 601 College Street, and is open from 12:00 noon until 11:00pm daily. They can be reached at 416.531.9911.