Musagetes and CAFKA are excited to announce that Luis Jacob will be speaking as part of our ongoing Big Ideas in Art & Culture Lecture Series. The lecture will take place on Friday, November 28 at 7 PM at Musagetes (6 Dublin St. S, Guelph ON), a physically accessible location. Join us for a samosa before the lecture at 6:30 PM! Admission is free.
For this Friday night edition of the Big Ideas Lecture, Jacob will talk about how artists work within a city to engage with local complexities. How do we bridge the relationship between the global city and this place we call home? In 1863, the poet Charles Baudelaire described the modern artist as “the painter of modern life.” In this way, he emphasized the modern artist’s unique and characteristic ability to capture the fleeting experiences of life within the urban metropolis – life in Paris, for example. Since that time, the relationship between art and its urban context has been explored from the perspective of the dynamic cultures produced in global “art capitals” – places like Paris, New York, and Berlin. For those of us who live elsewhere, the question becomes: How can we understand art’s capacity for engaging with urban life from the marginal perspectives of localities beyond the “art capitals”? This presentation will begin with a brief overview of ways in which recent exhibitions have explored the urban roots of modern artistic culture. It will lead to a consideration of techniques used by artists in Toronto in order to investigate the complexity of local experiences.
Luis Jacob (born Lima, Peru, 1971) lives in Toronto. Working as artist, curator, and writer, his diverse practice addresses social relationships and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. He has achieved an international reputation, with solo exhibitions including: Kunsthalle Lingen (2012); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, and McCord Museum, Montréal (2011); Art in General, New York, and Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2010); Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009); and Kunstverein Hamburg (2008). He has also participated in group exhibitions including: Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, Philadelphia (2014); Taipei Biennial 2012, and Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2012); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2008); and documenta 12, Kassel (2007).
His curatorial work includes projects such Funkaesthetics, presented at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, and Confederation Centre for the Arts, Charlottetown, in 2009 (exhibition co-curated with Pan Wendt); and Golden Streams: Artists’ Collaboration and Exchange in the 1970s, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga, in 2002. He is also the editor of the anthology Commerce by Artists, published by Art Metropole, Toronto, in 2011. Luis Jacob is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto, and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf.
Image: Luis Jacob, From Stream to Golden Stream (2006), installation view at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery; image courtesy of Birch Contemporary, Toronto
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