Form Follows Fiction : Art and Artists in Toronto

A book which explores how a group of artists understand and visualise their surrounding city of Toronto.

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 It includes historical documents gathered from local archives, as well as contemporary ephemera.This title is published in partnership with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.