Main Street. 125 Huron Street, South Entrance. Toronto, M5T 2B3.

Paintings from the ChromaZone 1979–1986. ​

Andy Fabo Oliver Girling Sybil Goldstein Rae Johnson Tony Wilson

August 15th–September 20th, 2020.

“We want images of the working life: office, construction-site, classroom, club; the sporting life; rock and roll, sex, astronauts; the domestic life; and the daily life of artists. We believe in the capacity of artworks to address the complexities of late Twentieth Century living in Toronto and other neighborhoods of the Global Village. Such as: careers, ambition, the rent, learning the new forms and languages, using the new technologies to keep redistributing the wealth.” - Inaugural ChromaZone press release. Mondo Chroma, September 15th-October 12th, 1981. ​ ​

Main Street is pleased to present a modest survey of paintings produced by the ChromaZone collective: Andy Fabo, Oliver Girling, Sybil Goldstein, Rae Johnson and Tony Wilson. The exhibition collects one to two works from each artist produced during, or immediately leading to, ChromaZone’s run.

ChromaZone was an artist collective active in Toronto from 1981–1986. In an apartment gallery situated in Toronto adjacent to Kensington Market, a culturally dynamic corner of Toronto’s otherwise gridded downtown core, the collective fostered a community that operated on the fringes of Toronto’s prescribed art circuit. Their programming cultivated a renewed interest in figurative art and promoted a cast of artists indiscriminate of sexuality, class, ethnicity and age.

ChromaZone was firmly situated in the social climate of 1980s Toronto. Although they programmed some international exhibitions, their work dealt predominantly with the lives of artists in Toronto—a city set apart from but heavily influenced by American culture and economic life. Corresponding concerns of reception, mass culture, communication, and exchange are present in their works. This was reflected in the group’s experimental approach to programming: their projects included satirically redesigning a historic site in Toronto that had been a haven for artist studios in response to it being slated for demolition, an exhibition that manifested as a large model home staging featuring more than 150 artists, and an emissary exhibition sent to accompany and correct the unrepresentative selections of a federally-funded Canadian art showcase in Berlin.

Throughout their experiments in democratized models of exhibition making, each member of ChromaZone pursued independent practices. Fabo, Girling, Goldstein, Johnson, and Wilson each approached figuration in a way that prioritized lived experience. Their work often relied on local source material like photographs of friends or Toronto landscapes; their subject matter extended to the wider political landscape of the 1980s, grappling with sex work, AIDS and AIDS activism and the effects of Canada’s high unemployment rates at the time. Consensus across the collective was that painting should reflect real life—and do so with urgency. The work sought to impress a sense of vulnerability upon its audience and offer reprieve from modern life’s dissociative effects, reinstating individual agency through the realization of intimate and in some cases confessional narratives.

The unpolished figuration that characterizes ChromaZone’s work is a product of their goal to remain prolific, constantly responsive to life’s rapid pace. There is a formal vernacular that unites each collective member’s disparate practice, but which also is reflective of a broader trend toward figuration in the 1980s, as with the Neue Wilde or Transvanguardia. (During the gallery’s run, darlings of this international trend like Julian Schnabel, Martin Kippenberger, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman all participated in Chromazone exhibitions.) What remained unique

about ChromaZone’s idiom, however, was that in many instances, they needed each other as an audience because they countered Toronto’s predominant tastes and only intermittently communicated with art networks abroad. This resulted in subtexts throughout their work that only they, or others close to their immediate community, would be able to decipher: whether it be the dry wit behind Goldstein’s Escalators II which depicts Toronto’s busiest downtown ​ ​ shopping mall, the Eaton Center; Johnson using two of her ChromaZone peers as models for the nude figures in her work Theatre of the Dislocated; or Girling’s allusion to Denison Mines, an obscure Canadian uranium mining ​ ​ corporation, in his painting Cleopatra. ​ ​

What transcended these local references however was a shared interest in drawing from the commercial image economy and filtering it through the lens of personal experience. Fabo’s Studs series for instance, drew likeness from ​ ​ photos of men he sourced from magazines and functioned as a means for him to sexualize the male figure, representing a desire that was excluded from mainstream media circulation at the time. Despite being void of any such media references, Wilson’s lithograph Falling for Make Believe further illustrates the desire to be liberated from ​ ​ ​ ​ the expectations of the status quo. Consistent through ChromaZone’s paintings, distorted scale and incongruous reproduction of logos, fashion imagery, and advertisements, made with imperfect transfer media, both undermines the intention of such commercial imagery, and indicates an anxiety about its success in permeating everyday life.

The ChromaZone artists all aimed to disrupt the exchange network of an emerging mass media society by using figurative painting to bring worth to otherwise subjugated topics, in an honest attempt to embody a sense of connectivity between art, bodies and life.

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Andy Fabo (born 1953, Calgary, Canada) is an artist, art critic, independent curator, AIDS activist, and art educator living in Toronto. He finished his undergraduate studies at the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art and moved to Toronto in 1975. He received his MFA from OCAD University in 2013. Fabo’s paintings, drawings, and films have exhibited widely nationally and ​ internationally. In 2005 he had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art that featured over thirty years of work.

Oliver Girling ( born 1953, Johannesburg, South Africa) is an artist living in Manitoulin, Ontario. He received his Bachelors of Art in english literature at in 1974. Girling’s work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally and is included in ​ ​ the collections of public institutions such as: the , Toronto, Ontario; the Peel Art Gallery, Brampton, Ontario; the ​ Art Museum at the , Toronto, Ontario.

Sybil Goldstein (b. Montreal, Canada; d. 2012, Toronto, Canada) was an artist and art educator. She graduated from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1976. Her work is included in collections such as: the Art Gallery of Algoma, Sault St. Marie, Ontario; Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario; Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario.; The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario.

Rae Johnson (b. 1953, Winnipeg, Canada; d. 2020, Toronto, Canada) was an artist and art educator. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design with honors in painting in 1980. Her work appears in museums and corporate collections across Canada, including the private collections of writer Michael Ondaatje, film producer Robert Lantos, actor Graham Greene, and the Frum family.

Tony Wilson (b. 1944 Prince Albert, Canada; d. 1991, Toronto, Canada) was an artist and educator. He graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1967. His work belongs to several private collections.