Strip Stories: Not Starting at Square One
From the book Excelsior 1968 by John Martz
Economic tides are turning, and veteran artist and dealer of Toronto's Queen Street West gallery scene Katharine Mulherin is ready with a new venture. Board of Directors, a collaborative curatorial project, marks its first exhibition this week with the opening of “Strip Stories,” featuring work by 12 Canadian cartoonists and artists who push the genre’s frontier.
Currently, Board of Directors is Mulherin and her former Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects gallery assistant Erin Stump. The decision to move to a collaborative model, where different curators can take the helm across different spaces and exhibitions, is in part a response to a climate of economic change, says Mulherin. “My feeling is that we might be running into some tough years in terms of the economy, not to mention that the growth of Queen West is making it a little harder for new galleries to open down here, or stay open.”
Mulherin and Stump’s hope is to assemble a “board” of independent and institutional curators, international dealers and MFA program affiliates who will use the Board of Directors spaces at 1086, 1082 and 1080 Queen West. The plan cuts the cost of operating the galleries alone. “After working on my projects for ten years, I came to realize that as much as I like seeing these spaces as galleries, there’s no reason for me to put on [so] many shows,” says Mulherin. “The alternative would have been to just let the galleries go.”
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From the book The End of the World by Jason Kieffer |
To see things fall apart now would surely disappoint Mulherin’s supporters. A pioneer on the scene, she opened the storefront BUSgallery to almost immediate critical acclaim in 1998 and, since then, has cultivated a reputation for showing strong new and (increasingly) established talent. In recent years, galleries mushroomed around her. Now Mulherin hopes, through Board of Directors, to suggest “a model for co-operation rather than competition.”
“One of the reasons we’re doing this is that I can’t make enough money on my own to support all the projects. This way, money can be less of a concern. That’s a better place to be for me,” says Mulherin. “I’m constantly wanting to push it further; with less overhead, and with support, I’ll be able to do that and hopefully it will work out well for everyone involved.”
As a start, “Strip Stories” looks like a surefire hit. With the premise being to celebrate the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning, many of the artists are nominees or past winners of the award. A highlight is original drawings from Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. The graphic novel garnered international acclaim for its historically accurate (but artfully manipulated) portrayal of Canada’s ambivalent hero. Then there are pages from John Martz’s quirky yearbook project, Excelsior 1968. In it, Martz redrew the faces from one of his mother’s old school volumes and called it the Bristol County Secondary School class of 1968, Staedtler, Ontario. (There is no such place.) And what would a show of comics be without reference to an aging fashion celebrity? Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld looks as hip as ever in Emily Holton’s rapier-wit drawings. (1080 Queen St W, Toronto ON)
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From the series Karl Lagerfeld and the book Little Lessons in Safety by Emily Holton |
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