January 20 to March 20, 2011
Reception: January 19, 7:00 to 9:00 pm
The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery is pleased to announce the first major Toronto exhibition of the work of Vancouver-based artist Ron Terada.
Ron Terada has come to international attention for his deadpan appropriations of vernacular texts typically drawn from street signage, popular music, television and advertising. Through their reproduction in media such as painting, graphic posters and video projections, Terada’s work harkens back to the cool, language-based formats of 1960s conceptual art but elicits decidedly contemporary questions. Does the name of a city confer its meanings to those who live there? Do the sponsors of an exhibition inform the identity of the artist? Is the play-list on his iPod a cue to his generational alignments or an expression of his most intimate longings? Just how, or even whether such circumstantial evidence can become an index of subjectivity, these are some of the constant puzzlements in Ron Terada’s propositions. The evidence may seem to deliver the ‘artist’ as a definable entity to the world around him – but in actuality it comes in the form of provocative passivity, itinerant chains of references, and comedic displacements, such as in Terada’s appearance as a poster boy in the form of a modular stack of cardboard boxes that contain multiple copies of his exhibition catalogue Ron Terada: Who I Think I am.
