How do artists in Toronto visualise their sense of place? Are there particular made-in-Toronto ways of thinking about the city?
Bringing together work selected by internationally renowned Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob, Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto concentrates on a period of more than fifty years to consider the ways in which artists visualise Toronto. Presenting a thematic clustering of works by 86 artists, the book is premised on the tendency of artists in the city to favour performative and allegorical procedures to articulate their sense of place.
Four gestures mapping, modelling, performing and congregating serve as guideposts to a diverse array of artistic practices. The book is a constellation of symbolic forms, or memes, that repeatedly appear in the work of artists of different generations; it presents a panorama of the blueprints that artists have drafted over many decades to give form to life in one of North America’s largest cities.
The book looks at a period of more than 50 years of artists who have visualised Toronto, and includes work by 86 artists, including Suzy Lake, Kent Monkman, Ed Pien, Roula Partheniou and Michael Snow, all of whom have previously published with Black Dog Publishing.
Form Follows Fiction includes historical documents gathered from local archives, as well as contemporary ephemera.
