Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art

Monday, February 17, 2020

Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art

MOCA occupies the former Tower Automotive Building in Toronto's Lower Junction neighbourhood. Exhibitions take up 4 floors at 158 Sterling Road - the 100 year old heritage building, once the tallest in Toronto, was an aluminum factory and is now home to contemporary art. As part of 'Art for Our Sake' the current exhibitions are 'A Sudden Beginning', 'Archiving Eden: Exchange', Images in Debris', 'High Sky Murmur Hole' and 'An Embodied Haptic Space'.

From MOCA's website; "When it opened a hundred years ago, this building was considered innovative because it did not use beams for support. Instead, it pioneered a new approach called concrete flat slab architecture. Each floor is a slab of reinforced concrete and is supported by concrete columns – the “mushrooms” you see on each floor, which distribute the weight to the floor below." With the columns defining corridors of open space, the museum fills the voids with exhibitions and also utilizes the tall walls for contemporary art and projections. I really like the building and the entrance fee is very reasonable - the adult ticket price is only $10. You can also check out the museum during free Friday nights from 5pm - 9pm.

A Sudden Beginning by Carlos Bunga (February 6 – May 10, 2020). You can enter the work if you take off your shoes and walk with care

Procession by Carlos Bunga on the ground floor. Painted cardboard columns

Images in Debris by Sarah Sze (February 6 – May 10, 2020)

HUSH SKY MURMUR HOLE by Megan Rooney (February 6 – April 12, 2020)

Just a window under maintenance

An Embodied Haptic Space by Shelagh Keeley (February 6 – May 10, 2020)

"For her exhibition at MOCA, Shelagh Keeley combines a series of tarp paintings from 1986, a film projection from 2016, and a brand-new ephemeral wall drawing — the latter of which she will create on-site over the course of several weeks in January 2020. In the visceral, site-specific installations she has been producing for over 40 years, Keeley balances the speed and rigidity of digital photography with the slowness and freedom of drawing in an expanded field. At the root of this installation are photographic traces of the MOCA building pre-renovation. Through her new wall drawing, one space in time is transferred into the present, as traces of labour are interwoven and transformed by a gestural response to the site."