The gallery as art object
WALL ART/ Some Toronto galleries aspire to be more than mere ‘white boxes’ for the display of paintings and sculpture. They are interesting in their own right.
Archive As the name suggests, Archive, which opened last November at 883 Queen St. W., takes its queue from a library specifically, a 1930s Modernist library with a contemporary twist. In the middle of the gallery, a dark oak counter reminiscent of a library information desk seems to float in mid-air. The desk comes complete with a pre-Second World War telephone and librarian’s stool. The space behind the desk is sliced in two by a "light wall," made of fluorescent tubes sandwiched between layers of sanded Plexiglas.
Owners Patricia Christie (a production designer and art director) and Johnson Chou (who designed the space) conceived the space as a public gallery and as a computer-archived library of over 4,000 Canadian works suitable for sale or rental as set decoration for film and television productions. Clients can browse through the images at a low birch counter while sitting on refinished steel chairs that could have seen duty in a musty government building.