//The Annual// 2012

ANDREW MACDONALD
CECILIA TIBURZIO
JOHNSON NGO

25-28 October 2012
at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, Ontario 

//The Annual// is the Gladstone's yearly showcase of the best in local art & design. It runs the same week as ArtToronto—the city's international art fair—and offers an alternative to the consumerist experience of wading through a sea of commercial gallery booths in a convention centre. For my part in the event, along with my curatorial collaborator Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, we presented a mini-exhibition subtitled keep it UP, featuring the works of three local emerging artists in one of the Hotel's second-floor guest rooms. Each artist's work lent itself to either abstractly or concretely evincing notions of "support". 

Curatorial Statement: 

In keep it UP at //The Annual//, three emerging artists offer unique depictions of support, emphasizing its disparate but related forms. In Cecilia Tiburzio's intaglio prints, support is visualized as a psychological system, a precarious and layered composition of identity. For Johnson Ngo, support manifests as a substantial but fragile structure. His pile of rice paper pillows nods to the comfort that support provides, yet their delicacy suggests the constant need to nurture something so easily breakable. In Andrew MacDonald's work, support is an invisible force. The space around his hanging sculptures and yarn installations are as integral to their structure as the materials themselves. Overall, these works beget a larger discussion of intricate relationships and networks—of reliance and interconnectedness. Support is not only a tie that binds these artworks, but the spirit of the entire arts community— specifically the efforts of emerging practitioners