Rising art stars Christian Giroux and Daniel Young premiere a new work in the upcoming exhibition Every Building in the City of Toronto, curated by Scott McLeod. It features an ambitious 35mm film installation that provides charged imagery of Toronto’s urban development during the economic boom preceding the current recession, while also acting as a document of the changing landscape of a vast urban centre.
The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by media theorist Peggy Gale published in the spring issue of Prefix Photo magazine. An opening reception, with the artists in attendance and in conjunction with the release of Prefix Photo 19, will be held on Thursday, May 7, 2009, from 7 to 10 PM at Prefix, located at 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124, Toronto. The exhibition runs until Saturday, June 27, 2009, and is presented on the occasion of the Contact Toronto Photography Festival.
All of the buildings for which a building permit was issued by the City of Toronto in 2006, excluding single-family dwellings, are featured in the resulting widescreen, thirteen-minute, 35mm film installation. Artists Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, who are nominated for the 2009 Sobey Art Award, filmed each building site to reveal an archive of development in the city, with a focus on spaces beyond the downtown core. In various stages of construction or completion, the sites express both the construction of space and the production of objects. The buildings themselves offer different kinds of working or living spaces and thus represent different forms of social space. In constructing this montage, the artists examine the multiple ways in which buildings and objects, both existing and in progress, inform our lived experiences.
The title of the work takes as its reference point both Ed Ruscha’s 1966 book of black-and-white photographs Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Stan Douglas’s large, composite photograph Every Building on 100 West Hastings from 2002. Like their predecessors, Giroux and Young experiment with elements of format, text and image to arrive at an ironically authoritative piece. Using the format of film, they are able to examine the aesthetic potential of the process of fabrication on a large scale. Their images, charged with the energy of expectation and possibility, represent the territory of the builder and the building-to-be; they stimulate an examination of space and the public body, within the city but frequently outside of the downtown core, where civic identity is often constructed differently.
Giroux and Young are primarily sculptors and their artistic collaboration is born out of shared sculptural interests, yet their interest in form is not confined to object making. In their approach to film, the artists focus on the medium of building and construction, presenting contrasts between the expressions of newly built forms and transitional sites as they affect the lived experience of the city. Every Building in the City of Toronto is an interrogation of the social and historical effects of buildings, the shape of a city and its structures, and the inherent sense of space and identity that a city inevitably forms.
About the Artists Since 2001, visual artists Christian Giroux and Daniel Young have developed a collaborative practice that investigates sculptural form and materiality within the expanded field of architecture and landscape. Their work has been shown at Scope:Miami, The Power Plant (Toronto), Pacific Cinémathèque (Vancouver), aceartinc. (Winnipeg) and Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto). Christian Giroux studied visual art at the University of Victoria and completed his MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the University of Guelph. Daniel Young has a background in urban geography and holds an interdisciplinary degree from the University of Toronto. He has held positions in the Architecture Department at the University of Waterloo and the Sculpture Department at York University. About the Curator Scott McLeod is a writer, curator and arts administrator. His work focuses on contemporary practices, with a specialization in photography, media and digital art. Since 2000, he has been the director and curator of Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, where he also serves as editor and publisher of Prefix Photo magazine. McLeod is a member of IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.
About Prefix Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art is a public art gallery and arts publishing house based in Toronto. A registered charitable organization, Prefix fosters the appreciation and understanding of contemporary photography, media and digital art. Recently, Prefix launched a new division, Prefix Press, and has just launched its first book, Milk and Melancholy by Kenneth Hayes.
Acknowledgements For their support of Christian Giroux and Daniel Young’s Every Building in the City of Toronto, Prefix gratefully acknowledges Yvonne and David Fleck. Prefix also recognizes the support of its Official Catering Sponsor à la Carte Kitchen and its Official Hotel Sponsor the Sutton Place Hotel. Lastly, Prefix acknowledges the assistance of the Toronto Arts Council.
For general information, please contact: Jayne Wilkinson T: 416-591-0357 E: info@prefix.ca
For media information, please contact: Olivia Tsang T: 647-430-7885 E: prefix@tsangmedia.com
A
Society of the Ontario
Association of Architects.
A
Society of the Ontario
Association of Architects. 
