PRESS REVIEWS - UPDATED MAY 31, 2007
EXTRA!, December 21, 2006
Antler Dance
Glo 10, Archive Inc’s 10th-anniversary show features works by John Armstrong, Gary Michael Dault, Patrick Decoste, Millie Chen, Eldon Garnet, John Greyson, Carolyn White, Juno Youn and more, including… recent Jay Wilson piece, “$150.” The exhibition is up till Sat, Feb 3 at 56 Berkeley St from 10am to 6pm on Monday to Friday and noon to 5pm on Saturday. Call (416) 703-6564.
The Liberty
Gleaner, November 2000
Chris Dupuis
Queen West gallery owners claim district
One of the most interesting spaces in the [Queen West] area is Archive Inc., at 883 Queen St. W., which functions as a commercial gallery that sells and rents art. In keeping with its name, it also contains a computer-based archive of works from artists in Toronto and Montreal.
Their clientele includes film and television productions, corporate clients and private collectors.
Prelude,
April 2007
Connie Hitzeroth Ohlman
Come Up and
See My Etching Sometime
How to turn your walls into a moveable art gallery
East on King Street is Archive Inc. Gallery and Art Library at 56 Berkeley Street in the Klaus by Nienkamper building. Established in 1996, the company primarily served the film and television industry, and corporate clients, via a digital database. But over time I believe owners Patricia Christie and Johnson Chou have come to recognize the needs of individuals who wish to rent art for their personal spaces. Their digital database of works is extremely user-friendly. Featuring categories like genre, subject, artist, value and availability in inventory, the software allows you to click on your selected piece, hold it in your shopping cart and review your selections afterwards. Archive holds about 290 works on site, while the balance of about 1,800 pieces would be called up from the artists’ storage when requested. Private rentals work like this: up to 3 months of paid rental fees can be applied to the purchase price of a piece of artwork, and the monthly rental fees are 5% of the sale price of the artwork.
If you’re just window shopping, you can ask for a print-out of your wish list or have it emailed to you for later perusal over a glass of red wine. With this comes the artist’s bio as well. So, for example, you take a liking to Barbara Astman’s 1998 Ektacolour mural series titled Study for Dreaming Impressionism, you can send home several images then take your time contemplating whether you’d like a pair, or maybe a trio, and where they’ll take up residence on your walls.
At this point in time, one must visit the Archive offices to use the database, however Cheryl Rondeau, general manager, estimates that by September of this year Archive could possibly have their entire database available online. This promises to be a very powerful innovation which, augmented by pre-arranged artists’ contracts and promotional packages, can provide Canadian artists a quality and style of representation that heretofore was never conceivable.
Toronto Life, November 1997
FASHION in our opinion
A LISTING OF THE LATEST IN LIFESTYLE IMPERATIVES.
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, January 25, 1997
Kelvin Browne
Gallery goes digital
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, May 17, 1997
The gallery as art object
Applied Arts Magazine July/Aug 1997
NOTEWORTHY
AZURE, May/June 1997
ARCHIVE IS A GALLERY CUM-FINE-ARTS-LIBRARY WITH A DIGITAL DATABASE OF SOME 8000 IMAGES OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART.
EXHIBITION REVIEWS – UPDATED MAY 31, 2007
art, September 11, 2003
Thomas
Hirschmann
Parental Units
Having children doesn’t have to get in creativity’s way
Maïder Fortune at Archive (883 Queen West) to October 4. 416-703-6565
Rating: NNNN
Archive is hanging a somewhat sparse show by French artist Maïder Fortuné that explores the fear residing in every parent’s heart – that some harm may befall one’s child.
Three large-format photographs hang in the gallery, each featuring two small girls in dresses playing on a bed near a chandelier in a room with sad green walls. In one, the fair girl stands on the back of the other, treating her like a doll. In the other pictures the fair girl lies on a pillow smothering the other beneath the billowing whiteness.
Titles Playing Dead, the body of work is taut and full of trepidation.
After night creeps out of Trinity Bellwoods Park and surrounds the gallery, a video loop plays on a screen in the window. Passersby see a black-and-white close-up of a girl skipping, her face moving up and down in fits and starts, leaving traces that create the effect of an eerie totem pole. The blue light from the projector seems to bisect her head.
July 15, 2007
Picasso and
Pollock
Gunilla Josephson at Archive, Inc.
Until July 21,
300 King St. Ea.,
Toronto; 416-703-6564
Chief among the three video works by Gunilla Josephson now at Archive Inc. Gallery + Art Library is her 68-minute magnum opus, The Blood-Red Heart of Johanna Darke.
The Principal videography for this feature-length video was accomplished three years ago, but the continual editorial fine-tuning to which Josephson has been subjecting the work for the past two years has given this highly ambitious piece a wonderful richness, timbre, pace and density.
The name of the Josephson’s heroine, who is and is not the artist herself, is both an echo of “noir” or blackness in the conventional literary-cinematic sense and also, at the same time, makes inescapable reference to Jeanne d’Arc – though the voices and visions of Josephson’s Joan impel her to try to save France in quite a different way.
The video is about a young woman who, in Josephson’s words, while “lost in the city of history,” is compelled to depart “the hothouse steam of her upbringing by the Grey Nuns Order in Quebec” in order to fulfill her destiny, as she sees it, as a member of the French Resistance in Paris in 1939. Through what the artist calls a “time warp” wrought by Johanna’s “own compulsion and belief,” the girl straddles space and time, arriving “time-capsuled” by train (by bullet-train!) to the Paris of 2003, still determined to play a role in the resistance.
Clearly believing, like legendary French new-wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, that movies ought to have a beginning and a middle and an end, “but not necessarily in that order,” Josephson, working with novelist-husband Lewis DeSoto and composer-pianist Eve Egoyan, has put together an aggregation of seamlessly beautiful, constantly moving tableaux made up of unforgettably vivid images and passages.
Johanna makes pilgrimages to Notre Dame Cathedral (sometimes it’s a hand-held model and sometimes it’s the real thing) to receive Resistance “instructions” from Joan of Arc; she rallies round the cause with a Pierrot companion/ familiar who steps out of Watteau’s commedia dell’arte painting, Gilles, in the Louvre; she helps to blow up a train – at least I think she does – and finally, in the end, languishes in prison, awaiting death at the hand of the Gestapo.
What is bemusing is how little of Johanna Darke’s story and its meaning can be circumscribed within this bald plot outline (if plot it can be said to have). Josephson’s video lives within its own hues and visual textures. Her painterliness (for she was a painter-sculpture-installation artist before turning to video) is everywhere apparent in the work: Scarcely a minute goes by during which you don’t feel the need to stop the film and look at an image at length, as if it were a photograph. The video proceeds (often hectically) by means of a sheer onslaught of inventiveness. Sometimes you lose track of it, but it never seems to matter: Josephson floats you along on a foaming sea of images and ideas, marshalled to the music of high poetry.
The Globe
and Mail, April 22, 2006
Gary Michael Dault
Where
there’s smoke (or cloud, or fog)…
Gallery Going
John Dickson
at Archive, Inc.
$800 - $30,000. Until May 19
56 Berkeley St., Toronto; 416-703-6564
A model Lockhead Electra, made roughly but skillfully of wood, plummets from the sky above the gallery, trailing clouds of what artist John Dickson says is white upholstery fluff from inside its left engine. The doomed plane throws its fearsome shadow against the wall (to which it is, in fact, attached). In your mind, you can hear its Rolls-Royce engines screaming in despair.
This is disquieting. This is the plane, first put into service in 1934, that Amelia Earhart was piloting on her ill-fated trip around the work in 1937. And besides, after Sept. 11, any plane screaming towards the ground gives us pause.
Dickson’s entire exhibition at Toronto’s Archive, Inc., called Smoke and Cloud, is disquieting. The odd thing, however, is the degree to which this thoughtful presentation of eleven works is also charming and ruefully amusing.
It’s virtuoso stuff. The artist clearly knows his way around model-making. But was keeps the work provocative and militates against its seeming merely cute is the fact that the unpainted wood models aren’t too good. Which is, of course, deliberate. Dickson says the exhibition, as the title suggests, is about smoke and cloud and not the models; thus, his Tanker is about what comes out of the funnel, not about the boat itself.
Even Dickson’s specific structures, his CN Tower, with a tangle of cloud impacted on its communications needle, his Sears Tower, his Golden Gate Bridge, only partly swaddled in fog, his two belching nuclear funnels – are all agents of miasmic smoke and cloud, steam, fog and mist. Some puff it out; some pierce it; some use it as a measurement of height and therefore of grandeur.
Centring this lively muster of smoky, cloudy moments in culture is Dickson’s extraordinary Smoking City – a vast gathering of cardboard skyscrapers and other urban edifices (Dickson has been adding to it for years) which, while it features buildings which are mostly generic, also offers an Empire State Building, a Transamerica Tower, a Toronto City Hall, and other icons of 20th-century architecture. What makes the installation memorable are the hidden fog machines, which, at the flick of a switch, transform the cardboard into a city of steaming in the relentless sun or, more disturbingly, smoking from some horrifying unspecific but devastating attack.
Where
Toronto, December 1998
ARCHIVE GALLERY
In late 1995 Archive Gallery and Art Library (883 Queen St. W., 416-703-6564) co-owner Patricia Christie, who also designs film sets, identified a need within the booming Toronto film and television industry for art that could be rented on short notice. When she met her soon-to-be partner Johnson Chou, they expanded their target audience to include artists and art consultants. To make the lives of hardworking professionals easier,
Christie and Chou digitally documented more than 10,000 craft and fine art works. In short order, Archive – which also sells art – has become a favourite with the public.
While Archive continually mounts rotating salon-style art exhibitions, visitors can also sit at a computer workstation and search the database for artworks by type, subject, style, medium, artist and value. The gallery couldn’t do more to make contemporary art accessible.
Throughout December Archive presents its third annual Glo Show of works priced around $500. Watch for sleek, light-refracting resin and steel wall sculptures evocative of mutant vegetation by Marianne Lovink, and Lisa Neighbour’s functional lamp sculptures with small coloured bulbs drolly perched atop incongruous bases. Lastly, while they’re elflike, you can be sure that Roger Carter’s plush figures – a cross between gnomes and gremlins – will not be appearing in a traditional holiday display near you.
Toronto Life, April, 1997
Art mart
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 20, 1999
Gallery Going
Gary Michael Dault
Narratives In Motion at Archive Inc.
The Globe and Mail, Saturday December 14, 1996
Deck the halls with affordable art
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, January 4, 1997
Betty Ann Jordan
Gallery Going
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, March 22, 1997
Betty Ann Jordan
Gallery Going
Amazing abstractions
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 6, 1997
Betty Ann Jordan and Gillian Mackay
Deck the walls
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 7, 1998
Gillian MacKay
Gallery Going
Pairing at Archive
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, May 9, 1998
John Bentley Mays
The art of the little black box
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, June 20, 1998
Betty Ann Jordan and Gillian MacKay
Gallery Going
Marianne Lovink and Penny Dimos at Archive
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, October 31, 1998
Gillian MacKay
Gallery Going
Jaga Jarosiewicz at Archive
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 5, 1998
Gillian Mackay and Gary Michael Dault
Making a list of nifty gifties
Where Toronto, January 1999
Betty Ann Jordan
Dynamic Downtown Art
Touch down at five of the scores of galleries that make up Toronto’s downtown art scene.