1 May—13 June 2009

Goodbye to Romance

Popular music is rife with fan-generated legends and myths pertaining to premature exits and mortal excess. Invoking the logic of paranoia, the group exhibition Goodbye to Romance brings together works that harness obsessive musical fandom and highlight the romantic futility of conspiracy theory. Going beyond simple narrative explication, the artists assembled employ conspiracy and coincidence as a means of amplifying latent meaning and of framing contemporary aesthetic experience. Seemingly disparate musical genres and their associated subcultural iconographies become linked by subtle synchronicities, arcane speculation, and a labyrinthine network of cabalistic connections. The darkly parallel worlds created commemorate a perfect time that never was—threnodic lamentations for lost potential and the commodification of adolescent desire. These baroque embellishments on the official story exploit the tension between surface detail and paranoid explication, material and concept, representation and reality, all in an effort to show that indeed “everything is connected.”

Information

Katie Bethune-Leamen is a visual artist, writer and curator based in Toronto; she holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. She is currently preparing Incantantions for Raising Dead Slang—A Ghost Chorus for Toronto’s 2009 Nuit Blanche. She was the curator of The Way I Are at the University of Toronto’s Blackwood Gallery and her writing has appeared in publications such as Border Crossings and Canadian Art.


Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto. In 2008, Dyment was artist-in-residence at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland. His sound work can be heard on the YYZ/Walter Phillips Gallery publication Aural Cultures and New Life After Fire, a collaboration with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. He is represented by MKG127, Toronto.


Lars Laumann is a Norwegian artist based in Berlin. Recently his work has been shown at White Columns and MoMA in New York, and at the 2008 Berlin Biennial. This summer he will present new work at his first solo exhibition at Maureen Paley, London and at the Nordic Biennial Momentum in Moss, Norway.


Jimmy Limit is a Toronto photo-based artist whose work has been exhibited locally as well as in Montreal, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. His photographs have been published in Bad Day; Hunter and Cook; and Vogue Paris. His self-published zines are available through Art Metropole in Toronto and Printed Matter in New York.


Tony Romano received his BFA from Emily Carr College of Art and Design and is currently based in Toronto. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally with recent group shows at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver, Trianon Gallery in Lethbridge, Remo Gallery in Tokyo and the Kulturhuset in Stockholm. He has had solo shows at Articule Gallery in Montreal and Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.

Elaine Gaito is Mercer Union’s Director of Public Programs and Development. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design, she was previously the Curatorial and Programming Assistant at The Power Plant, where she helped develop and coordinate exhibitions and public programming initiatives. Her recent curatorial projects include PLAY/GROUNDS, a series of site specific works installed throughout Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood in 2007.