How do artists in Toronto visualise their sense of place? Are there
particular 'made-in-Toronto' ways of thinking about the city? With work
selected by internationally renowned Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob,
Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto considers the ways in
which artists see and understand their city, throughout a period of
fifty years. Presenting a thematic clustering of works by 86 artists,
the book is premised on the tendency of artists in the city to favour
performative and allegorical procedures to articulate their sense of
place. Four gestures--mapping, modelling, performing and congregating--
serve as guideposts to a diverse array of artistic practices. The book
is a constellation of symbolic forms, or memes, that repeatedly appear
in the work of artists of different generations; it presents a panorama
of the blueprints that artists have drafted over many decades to give
form to life in one of North America's largest cities. The book features
work by artists such as Suzy Lake, Kent Monkman, Ed Pien, Roula
Partheniou and Michael Snow, all of whom have previously published with
Black Dog Press. It includes historical documents gathered from local
archives, as well as contemporary ephemera. This title is published in
partnership with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
