ARCHIVE IS A GALLERY CUM-FINE-ARTS-LIBRARY WITH A DIGITAL DATABASE OF SOME 8000 IMAGES OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART.
ArTchive It must be sign of the no-nonsense times that art galleries feel compelled to offer something more than just art. Face lifts for public galleries routinely feature a splendid new restaurant and/or gift shop to lure in consumers. The trend in commercial galleries is to provide computer search engines able to source a huge network of artworks, offering a selection that these small, independent facilities otherwise couldn’t possibly keep in their own stacks. It’s ‘gallery as fine arts library’, a concept that took off in Toronto last year when the Tatar/Alexander Photogallery cornered the market on contemporary photography with its extensive database inventory of about 2,000 images.
Now there is Archive, a new "visual arts venue" that is at once hip commercial art gallery and comprehensive digital resource centre. Production designer/art director Patricia Christie and intern architect and designer Johnson Chou have upped the ante by including in their 6,000-strong digital database all manner of artworks: paintings, photography, installation, illustration, even furniture, clay, glass and textile art. The all-Canadian collection includes works by art students, graduates, emerging artists, as well as such established names as Noel Harding, John Massey and John Scott.
Archive’s mandate is twofold: to familiarize an estranged public with contemporary Canadian art; and to ease the process of art rentals for set decorators, interior designers, architects and graphic designers by sourcing items and pre-arranging copyright and insurance deals with the artists.
Designed by Chou, Archive’s interior does double duty as well. The multifunctional 80-square-metre main floor space, a locale familiar to Toronto art swells from its previous incarnation as Gallery Idée, performs smoothly as resource library and gallery. A pivoting translucent wall separates the administration area at the rear from the computer terminals at the front, then swings against the wall for gallery openings. Similarly, a floating wood wedge carves the room in two, serving as a reception counter. For large gatherings, it pivots out of the way. In an impressive display of hyper-efficiency, when both are parallel across the room the left junction forms a work triangle, allowing one person the man the phone, access files and the computer terminal while holding film up to the backlit screen-cum-light table.
Aside from the decidedly up-to-the-minute computer systems and quirky digital clock, by Toronto artists Millie Chen and Warren Quigley, the reigning aesthetic is 1930s modernism, hence the period industrial stools, aluminum chairs, desk lamps and black rotary telephone.
However, with its stripped-down surfaces and digital precision, Chou has subverted the notion of archive as a cluttered Kafkaesque bureaucratic shambles.
Something the elegant, orderly Archive is anything but.