OPENING RECEPTION
and Glenn Lewis’s kimchi performance
11.06.15, 6pm

LOCATION
Cooper Cole Gallery
1161 Dundas Street West
Toronto

Kunstverein Toronto is pleased to present a survey exhibition of work by Vancouver artist Glenn Lewis – his first solo exhibition in Toronto since 1975.

Lewis is a classically trained potter, a performance artist, poet, photographer, collaborator, radio personality, chef, topiary enthusiast, master of disguise and wearer of many hats. At times he is known as Flakey Rrosehip or E.E. Claire. In the early 1960s, Lewis studied ceramics under Bernard Leach, the renowned studio potter who employed both Western and Eastern methods and philosophies, and he has been making pots and bowls ever since. In the late ‘60s, he created a series of vessels and phallic ceramic saltshakers sometimes encased in bright Plexiglas boxes. They could have been made today. Outside of the studio, Lewis helped form the Vancouver artistic community as we know it. In the 1970s, he co-founded both Western Front and the live-work space New Era Social Club, and was an early board member at Intermedia, offering alternatives to the existing institutions and practices. Lewis and his friends hosted dinner parties, pageants, performances, mayoral campaigns, galas, radio programs, pickling sessions, experiments in gardening and forest retreats under the umbrella of art-making.

The exhibition at Kunstverein Toronto presents decades of ceramics, sculptures, photography, performance props and other ephemera, creating no hierarchy between Lewis’s many artistic pursuits. Often his performative and pottery-based practices move harmoniously on parallel paths; occasionally they come together. Amid the material of a long and varied career, the exhibition features several major works: Song Bowls for East Hastings (2012), and three of Lewis’s early ceramic and Plexi works, which are lesser known in Toronto – Invincible Beauty Box (1969), Travellers Companion Series (Fairy Ring) (1968) and Milky Way Room Freshener (1968).

Alongside the exhibition, Lewis will reconvene the New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver – a mail-art exchange group formed by Lewis in 1970. Part of a network of artists that included General Idea, Ant Farm in San Francisco and Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, the NYCSDSOV camouflaged its meetings as synchronized swim routines during public hours at the Crystal Pool in Vancouver, with participants clad in shark fin swimming caps made by artist Kate Craig. On June 27, Kunstverein Toronto and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery/University of Toronto Art Centre will co-present a new performance of the New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver at the historic Hart House Pool. Lewis will spend the month of June working with a group of swimmers (local artists, curators and writers) for Toronto’s first meeting of the NYCSDSOV.

With the NYCSDSOV and elsewhere, Lewis works in relation to others – Bernard Leach, Kate Craig, Michael Morris, Hank Bull, to list a few. At Kunstverein Toronto, he is joined by Derya Akay – a young Vancouver-based artist, ceramicist, painter and cook. Akay presents a new installation in the gallery’s window: a series of painted, semi-transparent geometric shapes, half-circles and hexagons of glass, mirror and Plexi, together with ceramic appendages and works on paper stained with organic matter – leftover sardine oil, coffee, tea and a solution of copper and vinegar. Maybe there is a pickle jar. Akay is invested in the alchemy of heat and light, and in half-living objects; in the process of transformation one finds in the kitchen, in the hardening of clay, the mutability of glaze and the chemical process of photography.

It may be a tenuous link from Lewis to Akay, but there is something about an untethered artistic practice founded in ceramics, with roots in the domestic, in the act of hosting, and in the pleasure of a non-sequitur.