TORONTO—Trudging through the snow as wind whipped my face during last Tuesday’s snowstorm, I had to ask whether any gallery opening was worth the trouble. But I’m going to assume that anyone reading this wasn’t as hearty as me, and missed the opening reception of Art Metropole’s current show ABC…With Love (Too Cool For School).
The show’s focus is the twenty-six paperback novel-sized gorgeous letterpress prints (in orange-yellow, steely-blue, and warm grey) pinned on the wall as you enter. Thirteen artists from around the world contributed to the prints, each drawing two letters of the alphabet. The works have a kindergarten-esque feel. Jill Henderson, who curated the exhibition and drew two of the letters, calls the show “curating-by-numbers.”
“Initially, I wanted to do a kind of a survey show,” Henderson told me on the phone from New York City, “with artists that use handwritten words or text in their work, which I do myself. I’ve seen a resurgence of that in recent years — of hand-drawn fonts by artists and people drawing words rather than using text. Maybe it’s as a kind of low-tech answer to the Mac computer, and to fonts.”
Poet John Giorno was just one of the contributors to the collection. At the opening reception, he performed six of his poems. Fitting with the elementary school vibe of the exhibition, twenty-somethings and grey-hairs alike sat cross-legged while the poet began. The floor creaked as Giorno moved around with marionette-like spasms, pausing only to deliver a characteristically blunt statement like, “Never fast forward a cum shot.”
My favourite letters were done by Virgina-based sculpture artist Matt King (I and N) and Toronto’s James Carl (E and Y). King’s shaky hand drawings presented the letters hidden in structured situations (like a board leaning against a wall with a clock above it, forming the image “i”), while Carl’s used crisp, heavily designed images, an upside-down plastic soda bottle standing in for the letter Y. King, Each letter was unique—the result of giving the artists free reign, according to Henderson.
“There were a few kind of ‘mm-hmm, okay, all-right-thens,’” she says. “A few of the artists wanted to know exactly what I wanted them to do and I told them, ‘I don’t care what you do with the letter. Give me a tiny scribble in the middle of the page that’s 2mm high. We’ll be able to letterpress that.’”
Rounding out the show are David Shrigley (Scotland), Fastwürms (Canada), Hrafnhildur Arnardottir aka Shoplifter (NYC, Iceland) and Martin Wohrl (Germany), among many others.
“There’s a real interest in mark making,” Henderson says; “the belief that everyone has a line; everybody has a way to draw. Everyone has a way to express themselves with their line with how they write things out or even draw little symbols or doodles and that kind of thing. Those kind of gestures always fascinate me.”
Although the drawing of letters was supposed to be random, Henderson fudged the results a bit. “I told them I was picking a letters for them out of an old welly boot — that it was sort of a random process. It was mostly random. I kind of looked at the letters. I wanted artist to have one shaped letter different than the other shaped letter so they would have something to play with. I didn’t want to give someone N and M. That would kind of suck.”
If you’re an ultra-hip (expecting) parent with cash to spend, I’d definitely suggest shelling out the $465 for a limited edition box set of the pressings to frame your toddler’s walls. (They’d go well with your tot’s Frank Gehry mobile.) Henderson spent more than a week hand-crafting the fifty-two wonderfully designed boxes that come with the collection.
“There’s something very funny about drawing letters,” says Henderson. “I’m not really quite sure what it is, but it makes me smile when I see people carefully drawing letters or words.”
ABC… With Love is at the Art Metropole until March 22.
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