McIntosh Gallery’s Graphic Underground: London 1977-1990 documents graphic works, primarily band gig posters and zines, by artists whose output was the visual record of a vital and prolific cultural community. Curated by artist and musican Brian Lambert, the exhibition features more than 80 original paste-ups, as well as 300 posters from the archive of works from private collections catalogued during the research phase of the project.
The exhibition is presented at Forest City Gallery, whose support of the alternative art and music scene during the period was, in many ways, key to its success. Many of the artists and musicians featured in the exhibition will attend the opening reception on Friday, October 26th at 7:00 P.M. Everyone is welcome at this free event, which includes the London launch of artist Jamie Q's latest book The Possibilites are Endless, published by the McIntosh Gallery Curatorial Study Centre.
For more information on the book and related events across Canada, visit McIntosh's events page. Brian Lambert will give a curator-led tour of Graphic Underground on October 30th at 6:00 P.M. The exhibition continues until December 15th.
The party continues: Join us on Saturday, October 27 at 9:00 P.M. for a special Graphic Underground concert at Call the Office featuring Uranus, NFG, The Zellots and The Enemas, four key bands from the London Punk scene. For more information on this landmark concert and a complete list of all Graphic Underground events, visit: graphicundergroundlondon.ca. This website is also a virtual extension of the exhibition. It includes images and documentation of almost 900 posters, which illustrate the impressive array of musical activity in London from 1977 to 1990. McIntosh Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the London Heritage Council, which has provided funding for the forthcoming exhibition catalogue.
For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, McIntosh Gallery's new Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at: nfinkel@uwo.ca
McIntosh Gallery is pleased to present a series of complementary exhibitions and events that look at the fascinating relationship between drawing and alternative cultures.
The fall season kicks off with Jason McLean: if you could read my mind,which includes 57 works completed since the artist returned to London, Ontario after living in Vancouver and Toronto and traveling extensively in North America and Europe. These drawings, paintings and sculptures form an idiosyncratic visual record of his experiences and perceptions, which, as the artist puts it, act as "a rhizomatic diary that pictorially represents my relationship with local environments." McLean's chronic mapping captures, with dazzling vertigo, his restless movements through an ever-changing terrain of cultural and social relations. Everything from fragments of popular culture to quotidian experiences appears in these immersive works. The exhibition catalogue, designed by London artist Marc Bell, includes essays by David Liss, Sarah Milroy and Christina Walde.
This exhibition commemorates the 100th anniversary of H. B. Beal Secondary School, where McLean studied art prior to attending the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Many distinguished Canadian artists have graduated from the Bealart program, including Greg Curnoe, Robert Fones, Wyn Geleynse, Jamelie Hassan, Ed Pien and film director Paul Haggis, who won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Academy Awards in 2004 for Crash.
Since leaving Beal, McLean has exhibited often, including projects at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles and ABEL Neue Kunst, Berlin. He is represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto and Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Curated by David Platzker, Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86 includes over 150 examples of the Los Angeles artist's zines, fliers, posters and album covers made for punk bands such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Go-Go's, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets, Ramones, Throbbing Gristle and Wasted Youth.
Circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, this show has been made possible, in part, by a grant from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the ICI Board of Trustees, and ICI Benefactors Barbara and John Robinson.
The McLean and Pettibon exhibitions open on September 27th at 7:00 P.M. For more information, visit www.mcintoshgallery.ca.
Our investigation continues with Graphic Underground London 1977-90, curated by Brian Lambert, which opens October 26th at Forest City Gallery. It tells the story of London's remarkable history as a centre for punk culture during the 1980s through the copious graphic art production of local artists and musicians. The forthcoming publication includes essays by Lambert, Anna Hudson, Ben Portis and Tom Carmichael, and illustrations selected from over 1,000 gig posters, zines, and album covers identified and catalogued during the project's research phase.
The exhibition opening at FCG will include the sale of zines by contemporary London artists and the launch of Jamie Q's latest artist book, THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS, published by the McIntosh Gallery Curatorial Study Centre. It will be followed by a concert at APK Live featuring four London bands from the 1980s reunited for the first time in more than 20 years.
More information is available at graphicundergroundlondon.ca.
Adrian Norvid: Showstoppers, Whoppers, Downers and Out of Towners opens at McIntosh Gallery on November 8th. Enshrining ruptures and breaking with conventions, Norvid's drawings conflate and debase incongruous genres and subject matter, including seventies rock, Rococo ornament, food packaging, talking trees and giant mushrooms. From 1960s psychedelic graphic design to Victorian ornament, Norvid breaks boundaries that traditionally define cultures and historical periods. Currently teaching at Concordia University, Adrian Norvid emigrated from the United Kingdom as a child and grew up in Southern Ontario. This might explain the curious mix of rockers, hillbillies and louts from both sides of the pond—think Jack Daniels meets Johnnie Walker— who inhabit the fantastic realms he creates. This exhibition has been organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Windsor.
For more information, contact James Patten at jpatten2@uwo.ca or (519) 661.2111. ext. 84602.
