AGO captures the everyday in new exhibition

By Jordan Z. Adler

 

A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario will feature grand artworks from Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hockney, dazzling illustrations from Toronto artist Fiona Smyth, and hundreds of items from Andy Warhol’s personal time capsule.

But the display pieces that curator Jim Shedden keeps thinking about are the grocery lists.

“They’re so fascinating,” says Shedden, who is also the AGO’s manager of publishing. “We were looking at the grocery lists the other day. And I thought…those poor artworks, I don’t know how they’re going to compete with these grocery lists.”

Those ordinary items are among the focus of I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces, opening to AGO members on April 13 and to the general public April 16.

I AM HERE will showcase decades-old home movies and photo albums from around the world, as well as diaries, mixtapes, and Instagram grids. This exhibition attempts to map how artists – both amateur and professional – have tried to capture the world. The aim is to bask in the delight and pleasure of the familiar, as well as show how artists have made sense of what they see in front of them.

“Everybody can be creative,” Shedden says, “and they can have a creative response to the world around them.”

 

Its timeline of human ingenuity moves, as one of Smyth’s illustrations charts in loosely-assembled comic panels, from cave paintings to TikTok. The exhibition, which was originally announced in early 2020 and later postponed, includes brand-new pieces conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We wanted to make sure there were opportunities to reflect on what had happened in the last couple of years,” Shedden says.

But those expressions are not merely reflections on quarantined anxiety and ennui. Many art pieces capture a sense of rage and injustice. In a room inspired by the activism that arose from the response to George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, one will see images and footage from protests around the world.

This part of the exhibition also contains thumbnail-sized videos of police violence in the United States in the four-month period following Floyd’s death. Shedden says this collage of footage is meant to tell the story of police brutality without fetishizing the violence. “It’s one of those rooms that could’ve been infinite,” the curator says.

While this footage from recent years is searing, I AM HERE also aims to reveal the more distant past in old home movies, collected and archived by Rick Prelinger.  Prelinger’s collection of home movies and other ephemera, housed in the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco, includes more than 60,000 films. Thousands of those archival and amateur works are also available online, as part of the Internet Archive.

“The exhibition is all about themes that we saw in traditional home movies, and some that we didn’t see. Just the kinds of things that we, as humans, have been cataloguing and documenting, sharing since perhaps the beginning of time,” Shedden says.

Also a professor of film and digital media, Prelinger collaborated with the AGO’s curators to bring those vital records of daily and domestic life to a larger space. I AM HERE culminates with a 26-minute compilation of home movies, directed by Prelinger, which will be projected on multiple screens.

In PANORAMA, each minute is devoted to a different letter of the alphabet. Although the A to Z chapters seem to provide a structure, it’s not a narrative; instead, it contains a collage of the quotidian, with a randomness that Shedden says he finds endearing. Shedden also notes that Prelinger “has a pure love for emulsion, sprocket-hole kind of cinema,” referring to the textures and imperfections of old Super 8 and 16mm film.

Among the other found-footage treasures projected in the space will include Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute film Love is the Message, The Message is Death. This collage of the African-American experience is full of pain, joy, and dance.

 

Fitting between the home movies and other documents of the day-to-day, Shedden and his curatorial team – including Prelinger, Alexa Greist, and R. Fraser Elliott – have included several pieces more traditionally found in art galleries.

Among them is the gargantuan, 20-foot painting Santa Monica Boulevard by David Hockney, a portrait of the sun-drenched neighbourhood outside Hockney’s studio. This will mark the painting’s first public viewing since the late 1970s.

The striking, sometimes-photorealist works of master Canadian painters like Mary Pratt and William Fisk will also be on display. Their stunning artworks are tethered to the exhibition’s theme, as the artists evoke the daily flux that surrounds them.

“This is really about [including] people who just really embraced the everyday with either a sense of love or awe,” Shedden says.

Other components of I AM HERE capture a sense of minutiae that Shedden says he finds invigorating. One of the more intriguing finds: more than 200 copies of The Beatles’ White Album, accompanied by a listening station.

Artist Rutherford Chang has compiled, over many years, thousands of first-edition copies of that self-titled album. Each copy tells a different story of the lifespan of the classic-rock record, and about the relationships between music lovers and a popular artifact. “You can actually open them up and look at them,” Shedden explains. “They have all that kind of dirt and grime, and fadedness, and people writing on them, ‘I love Paul.’”

There is something poignant in seeing the same objects and rituals – such as that obsession with The Beatles or those grocery lists – span across cultures and nationalities.

But a significant portion of I AM HERE will derive from the pop contemporary, including bits from Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. There will be snippets from early reality television, like the interactive TV series Speakers’ Corner (including early footage of the Barenaked Ladies), as well as clips of Jennifer Ringley, widely considered to be the first camgirl.

Meanwhile, Shedden says iconic Canadian works are re-emerging from the vaults. Displays will include prominent pieces by Sandra Brewster, Jack Chambers, Keith Haring, and Keiran Brennan Hinton.

It is not difficult to bridge the kinds of material and digital artifacts on display with some of our creative impulses: shooting a home movie, taking a selfie, making art with materials from home. As a result, I AM HERE may end up being one of the AGO’s most absorbing exhibitions.

“It’s a very earnest and optimistic show, which I think makes it somewhat unusual in the world of contemporary culture,” Shedden says. “It’s joyous.”

 

Admission is free to AGO Members, those with an Annual Pass, and those 25 years and under. Timed-entry tickets must be booked in advance and are now on sale. For more information, visit ago.ca