Johannes Zits

16 January 2003 - 22 February 2003
Opening Reception 16 January 2003 8pm

Platform:

A Poster Project

Johannes Zits is no stranger to taking art out into the streets. Utilizing a campaign of billboards, posters and large-scale window images, Zits removes his art from traditional spaces and (dis)places it within the path of the everyday. With this platform project, Zits will plaster the streets of Toronto with a four-part series of posters that will confront pedestrians with issues of space (both private and public), voyeurism, consumerism and desire, exploring all these through a queer lens.

From a combination of collage, paint, assemblage and computer manipulation emerges a series of seductive homoerotic figures set within equally alluring domestic interiors appropriated from interior design magazines. By borrowing images from popular media originally intended to seduce consumers, Zits constructs and collages single and paired males that further suggest a desire to express, consume and possess. Zits’s male subjects occupy their personal space comfortably, but how do they occupy our public space?

By placing these images in urban sites, unsuspecting viewers become voyeurs peering into the private interiors and lives of these men; their private space becoming ours to consume. But is it their private space or our public space that is being invaded? Their queer presence also begs the question to whom does public space belong? Individuals will have their environment disrupted for a short period with the questions put forth by Zits and his boys.

This guerilla campaign was preceded with a similar project in Amsterdam in conjunction with Pink Film Days in December of 2002. Zits’s posters will be plastered throughout Toronto beginning January 6, 2003. Pages Book Store (256 Queen St West) will also feature a window display of the poster series, from January 6th To February 2nd.