Standout Booths at Art Toronto 2024
Installation view of Art Toronto 2024 at Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Photo by Lodoe Laura.
Now in its 25th edition, Art Toronto once again returns to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, filling the event space with booths full of art from both national and international galleries.
This year’s Focus Exhibition, the place to which we return, curated by Rhéanne Chartrand, digs into the notion of “home”—be it a place, a gesture, a community, or a feeling. The artists featured in the exhibition engage with the curatorial theme broadly. Appropriately, rather than attempting to compress the works together with a singular set of explanations, Chartrand offers a poem in place of a curatorial statement, engaging with the complexities and inheritances implicated by the title.
Below are some of the standout booths at the 2024 edition of Art Toronto, which runs through Sunday, October 27, 2024.
Michelle Sound, nimama (2024) and Fireweed (2024). Installation view of CEREMONIAL/ART, Art Toronto 2024. Photo by Lodoe Laura.
CEREMONIAL/ART, Vancouver
Categorized under the “Verge” section of the fair for galleries less than 10 years old, CEREMONIAL/ART’s curator Jake Kimble calls the gallery a “little sister” to the larger Macaulay + Co. Fine Art, exhibiting across the hall. CEREMONIAL/ART’s booth at Art Toronto displays work by Haley Bassett, Shoshannah Greene, Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher, and Michelle Sound. The gallery focuses on work made by contemporary Indigenous artists and, according to Kimble, aims to effect a more relational rather than extractive relationship with the artists it exhibits and represents.
Michelle Sound. Swan River 150E (2024), Reserve Allotment (2024), and Range Road 100 (2024). Installation view of CEREMONIAL/ART, Art Toronto 2024. Photo by Lodoe Laura.
Cree and Métis artist Michelle Sound’s unconventional approach to photography bookends the booth. In nimama (2024) and Fireweed (2024), she layers dreamy silhouetted cyanotype images atop elk hide drums. In Swan River 150E (2024), Range Road 100 (2024), and Reserve Allotment (2024), the artist complicates grayscale photographs of a landscape. Rejecting the clarity of an objective, history-telling image, Sound rips through its flat surface and adorns the photograph with colorful beading and embroidery, re-animating the views.
Studio Rat, Plastiscapes (2024). Installation view of Blouin Division, Art Toronto 2024. Photo by Lodoe Laura.
Blouin Division, Montreal / Toronto
A simultaneously ominous and playful commentary on the irreversible impact of plastic on our environment and daily lives, Studio Rat’s inflatable bubble balloons surreally amid the booths of Art Toronto. Dom Di Libero and Emily Allan, the artists behind the Montreal and Toronto-based Studio Rat, use DIY methods to rework plastic bags and other discarded materials into an interactive soft sculptural work. In the sculpture, I recognize the familiar disposable shopping bags of the region’s large-chain grocery and convenience stores, which the duo transforms into a patchwork ecosphere. The more adventurous among the Art Toronto crowd are invited to slip on pink shoe covers and enter the plastic dreamscape.
Kayza DeGraff-Ford, The Headless Rider (2024) and Game of Chess (2024). Installation view of The Blue Building, Art Toronto 2024. Photo by Lodoe Laura.
The Blue Building, Halifax
Several of Kayza DeGraff-Ford’s paintings are presented in The Blue Building’s booth this year. The Alberta-born emerging artist’s work engages with the history of painting in clever and unusual ways while exacting images set firmly in the present. Puffs of smoke plume out of the beheaded neck of a horseback-riding figure dressed in track pants and sneakers in The Headless Rider (2024). DeGraff-Ford’s paintings are brightly painted on their verso and seemingly glow as though backlit as their heavy canvases hang, hovering a few inches away from the wall. In a space loud with competing voices, DeGraff-Ford’s clear artistic vision helps make The Blue Building’s booth a standout.
Lamar Robillard, Holding Space, 2020. Installation view: BAND, Art Toronto 2024. Photo: Lodoe Laura.
BAND, Toronto
For 14 years, the Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND) has been a space for Black artists and cultural workers to gather and engage in cross-cultural dialogues. The Toronto-based gallery is set to re-open at 19 Brock Avenue after extensive renovations in Spring 2025. Their booth at Art Toronto presents work by Black artists across continents and includes works by Frantz Brent-Harris, Vanley Burke, Chiedza Pasipanodya, Janice Reid, and Lamar Robillard.
Lamar Robillard’s ceramic sculpture Holding Space (2020) is adorned with a number of incense sticks which jut out from its hollow form. The work has been used in collaborative processes by the New York-based artist, in which each guest is invited to light one of the sticks of incense. While each stem burns individually, they are held communally by Robillard’s vessel.
Rebecca Munce, Wrangling Stars, 2024; Yves Tessier’s Intérieur (Nîmes), 2012; and Kitchen Objects in Red Barn, 2024. Installation view: McBride Contemporain, Art Toronto 2024. Photo: Lodoe Laura.
McBride Contemporain, Montreal
Rebecca Munce’s Wrangling Stars (2024) is equally exciting when viewed up close as it is from afar. At first, the work appears almost like a quilt, a giant tarot card, or some mystical emblem. Across the panel, the Toronto-born and Montreal-based artist weaves a dream-like story, imbuing every inch of the work with characters who seem set from a personal fairytale. The oil on aluminum work is at once a painting and a drawing; the artist first covers the panel with oil paint, then carefully scratches away the paint with hand-drawn elements. The sgraffito reveals the substrate in magical ways that need to be experienced first-hand. I could spend hours pouring over the details of each figure in the work, weaving a tale of goddesses, peasants, goblins, and a whole cast of characters and creatures.
Known more commonly for his figurative works, Montreal-based artist Yves Tessier’s Intérieur (Nîmes) (2012) and Kitchen Objects in Red Barn (2024) present interior views. Though separated by 12 years, the works are complementary. Created in handmade casein paint, Tessier’s repetitive use of color and linework brings depth and dimension to the flat surfaces. The bright green Bluetooth speaker in Kitchen Objects in Red Barn, created just in time for McBride Contemporain’s booth at Art Toronto, seemingly winks at Munce’s much larger green work.
Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire, Over(us)alls 1,2,3, 2023; and Follow Your Chest, 2023. Installation view: two seven two, Art Toronto 2024. Photo: Lodoe Laura.
two seven two, Toronto
In the main exhibition space, two seven two—a gallery that opened just last year—exhibited many standout works, including screenprints made in blueberry ink by Port Severn and Toronto-based artist Lisa Myers, densely layered photographs by Luther Konadu, who is based in Winnipeg, and bright contemporary textiles by Alberta-based Miruna Dragan.
Downstairs, by the entrance of the space, Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire’s sculpture-painting hybrid works reference home, the place to which we return. Over(us)alls 1,2,3 (2023) reference utilitarian clothing and domestic life. The exaggerated overalls and a t-shirt take playful, almost sentient forms as they sprawl across the platform. Follow Your Chest (2023) references garments of protection and serves as a reminder to follow your intuition to guide you home.
Art Toronto 2024 takes place between October 24th to 27th at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
