Exhibiting Artists: Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Nour Bishouty, Jesse Chun, Tom Chung, Common Accounts, Miles Gertler and Igor Bragado, Julia Dault, Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, Alexa Hatanaka & Ashoona Ashoona, Aaron Jones, Pamila Matharu, Native Art Department International (Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan), Oluseye, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Jagdeep Raina, Tony Romano, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Walter Scott, Azza El Siddique, Kara Springer, Sahar Te, The collective of Parastoo Anoushahpour (Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko). PIA specifically supported Azza El Siddique’s Fade into the Sun (2021) installation in GTA2021.
Partners in Art is proud to support MOCA’s project Greater Toronto Art 2021 taking place September 2021 through January 2022. This project features twenty-one artists from the Toronto area as curated by November Paynter, Rui Mateus Amaral and Daisy Desrosiers. This project will be on view at 158 Sterling Road; for more information, read below or visit MOCA’s website.
Greater Toronto Art 2021 (GTA21) is a momentous, multidimensional museum-wide exhibition of 21 art projects created by artists who currently work in Toronto or are intensely connected to the city. It marks a profound turn towards the local, highlighting some of the most energizing and dynamic artistic practices being developed in Toronto today. The title we’ve adopted, which plays on the name of the city’s broad metropolitan area, addresses our ever-expanding notion of what Toronto might be, where it extends and what creative ideas and attitudes exist here.
Through a significant number of new commissions and never-before-seen artworks, GTA21 is intended to support our community as we move through profound shifts in our society. For this reason, we have embraced the term “relationship” to describe this exhibition’s production and experience, as it asks all of its contributors and public for new and varying forms of contact, attention, willingness, questioning, empathy and hope.
The works included are diverse in form and include architectural models, film, installations, painting, print-making, sculpture, works that exist on digital platforms and a conceptual shop that will include editions and publications. The approaches to production are also varied, with a number of artists having returned to a hand-craft-orientated practice during this period to create wood carvings or works in hand-formed paper; while others have been invited to push their creative limits and work into the virtual realm, or to create futuristic models out of 3D-printed elements. Likewise, the artists themselves hail from a myriad of cultures and countries, with 80% identifying as BIPOC.
The process to curate this exhibition included numerous virtual studio visits and conversations launched in the summer of 2020 to explore what it means to be sheltered and how our professional practices may be re-evaluated. We foresee the resulting GTA21 exhibition engaging various states of artistic response—those that process this moment by looking inwards and those that hypothesize a new world. In turn, we—artists, visitors and the public—will explore how our city and social reality has changed, and will continue to adapt, in the midst of transformation and reopening.
