The Power Plant’s Summer 2012 season in Toronto

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 19 JUNE 2012

The Power Plant opens a new group exhibition and celebrates with a
lakeside summer opening party on Friday, 29 June 2012

The Power Plant’s Summer 2012 season opens with a group exhibition of work
united by the idea of art as tools. Tools for Conviviality features artists from
Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, and Vienna, some emerging and some more
established, who create and engage tools to comment on how we live in this
world.

Participating artists include: Abbas Akhavan, Raymond Boisjoly,
Geoffrey Farmer, Claire Fontaine, Kyla Mallett, Swintak/Don Miller, Reece
Terris, Oscar Tuazon, Ulla von Brandenburg, and Franz West.

This exhibition features works that are interactive as well as mechanisms
towards self-help, political shifts, ritual devices, defence, and critique.
Referencing the 1973 text by philosopher Ivan Illich of the same name, which
sought to dismantle the specialization of industrial knowledge by elites, Tools
for Conviviality seeks to develop a politic of having more individual influence in
the world. The tools that most interested Illich, and are reflected in the
exhibition, have links to self-organization, Wiki models, democratic space, and
forms of communal activity.

Curated by Melanie O’Brian, this exhibition is on view from 30 June through
26 August 2012, and opening party is set for Friday, 29 June from 8 – 11
PM, free to the public. Many of the artists will be in attendance, so please join
us on the gallery’s lakefront terrace as we continue to celebrate our 25th
anniversary year.

Works by Abbas Akhavan and Claire Fontaine include homemade armaments,
while Franz West’s interactive Adaptives connect viewers with their individual
visual and tactile experience of objects. Geoffrey Farmer presents a project
based around a half-formed figure that will be added to and changed by
children over the course of the exhibition, and Ulla von Brandenburg’s
engagement with stage and props results in a film installation (seen only once
before) that approaches the power of ritual as a tool. Kyla Mallett’s
appropriated constellation-like diagrams are pulled from a self-improvement
manual, Oscar Tuazon’s sculptural work brings an industrial aesthetic to playful
utopian architecture, and Reece Terris identifies a professional and personal
custom of thanks and consolation. Raymond Boisjoly’s new exterior text-based
work considers The Power Plant’s location within aboriginal histories and
Western vernaculars, and Swintak/Don Miller’s new work grafts a piece of an
experimental rural project onto the gallery.

THIS EXHIBITION IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE POWER
PLAYERS PROGRAM: BMO FINANCIAL GROUP, CIBC,
MANULIFE FINANCIAL, ROGERS, STONEGATE PRIVATE
COUNSEL, AND TD
SECURITIES

Dissenting Histories: 25 Years of The Power Plant
continues to 26 August 2012 with a new artist project by Dave Dyment
Curator: Melanie O’Brian

Dissenting Histories: 25 Years of The Power Plant is an ongoing project
designed to activate and put into dialogue the gallery’s rich histories. Installed
in a space designed by Markus Miessen, a German architect and writer who has
considered institutional histories and has contributed to our thinking about
participation in public space and design, the archive exhibition considers our
history within local and international contexts, as well as within present spatial
and theoretical concerns. As a space for staging events around The Power
Plant’s history, including the From the Archives series of presentations and
lively conversations between curators and artists vital to The Power Plant’s
history, we are also presenting print materials, videos, slides, and an online
archive of ephemera. Toronto-based artist Dave Dyment is mining the archives
and responding to the project with a new series of works. Working with audio,
video, photography, and the production of artists' books, multiples and
editions, Dyment’s witty practice mines popular culture, vernacular
photography and music.

As a way of marking its past achievements and looking forward to its future
successes, The Power Plant continues the ALL YEAR, ALL FREE program. Due
to the generous support of the Hal Jackman Foundation, gallery is free to
everyone, dropping admission fees for the entire year.
Please send all requests for interviews and images to rboyko@thepowerplant.org.
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