As an artist, curator, and educator, she is a multifaceted individual. Her continuous contributions to the Toronto art scene have left their visible mark on the fabric of this city. Rae Johnson’s story of the 1980s Toronto is an eye-opener for the younger generation who lack the awareness and the resources to learn about the decade that witnessed a major shift socially and politically, both at a national and an international scale. 
   

Michelle Lun: As a founding member of the Torontonian-based collective group known as ChromaZone, you have had the exposure and many opportunities to work collaboratively with other contemporary artists who came to maturity in the 80s. Thereafter, you have held numerous positions in different educational institutions – such as the Ontario College of Art and Design University and the Toronto School of Art. To what extent has this shaped your personal motivation and intentions in conceiving the This is Paradise exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art?

Rae Johnson: Oliver Girling and I were both living in New York in the fall of 1979. We had met in the previous winter when Tom Dean (the guest curator) asked us – along with Andy Fabo – to exhibit our new paintings at A Space. Our work did not fulfill the criteria of the mainstream galleries, nor the artist run centers. It was figurative, sexual, physical, direct, and not the prevalent look. Our work was detached from the mainstream – mediated through academic realism or photographic realism.

We decided to open our own gallery to show new, figurative paintings that had not been seen before. ChromaZone opened up a floodgate of painted images; one that had been created by a generalized, iconoclastic aesthetic.

The artist run centres programmed exhibitions far in advance. They did this mainly to satisfy the bureaucratic structure of the Canada Council for the Arts in exchange for a steady stream of public money. Unlike them, we were entrepreneurial. We paid for our own gallery – the core members paid an equal share of the monthly rent – and we sold beer illegally at the openings to pay the artists.  We wanted to sell work and make paintings that people could afford. The media attention and the critical acclaim were more of a surprise, a shock even.

I always thought that our gallery responded to the moment: a place where one could see the emergence of a new paradigm. We were not ideologically exclusive. However, abstraction was an exception; we felt that it had run its course and did not offer a language that could respond to what painting had to look like. We wanted to provide a venue for what we wanted to see: High art and Low art.

I have always seen painting as part of a larger continuum of ideas and other practices. Oliver Girling’s first press release for our inaugural exhibition, Mondo Chroma (1981), was a call for a new order of images, such as astronauts, sex, drugs, rock and roll, fashion, etc. We wanted to challenge the official mass media and offer our own representations. We would fill our gallery from floor to ceiling with paintings, drawings, and sometimes with photographs and sculptures. My interest then was – and still is to this day – to look at art as a record of the human experience through history.

The exhibition at the MOCCA very much reflects the spirit of the ChromaZone, since the works that are featured – painting, music, theatre, sculpture, video, conceptual art, historical documents, magazines – recreate a model of that period; a moment representing the turn of the 1980s to 1987.

As an artist, educator, and curator, I am interested in the connections and resonances between cultural markers – music, visual art, popular culture, and social conditions relative to attendant global relationships. As technology becomes increasingly embedded in our biological being and a central interface with external reality, the mark or the hand-made is experienced from a socially conditioned perspective – video games, Internet, iPhones. The cave art that is the first visual communication we know of – as seen in Werner Herzog’s Caves of Forgotten Dreams (2010) – still moves us, because it remains bare and mysterious, yet readable by humans thirty five thousand years later. It would be interesting to test whether an ape could see these images too, and what it would suggest. I digress.    

Farhad Manouchehri: From photography to painting, this exhibition offers various media and encapsulates a large range of artists associated with the art and music scene of the Cameron House. What was your approach in selecting the artists, and what was the nature of your curatorial collaboration with Herb Tookey?    

RJ: Herb Tookey had collected and acquired a collection of art and ephemera during his association with the Cameron from 1981 to 1989. A couple of people in the cultural sector, who were his friends from those days, encouraged him to do something with his collection. He asked me to help him with putting together a proposal for the MOCCA in 2007. He asked me to start with the artists from the 1987 Cameron Culture show at the Gallery 101 in Ottawa. On the original black and white cover of the foldout brochure was Peter MacCallum’s documentary photograph of Tom Dean’s hand painted sign This is Paradise (1983). The inside of the brochure included paintings by Derek Caines as well as extracts from Dean’s This is Paradise essay. On the back cover was a photograph of the Cameron entrance. 

During the initial meeting with David Liss, Herb and I discussed a preliminary list of the artists and the musicians. I came back with a power point proposal titled This is Paradise, with images, a budget, a list of artists, and a proposal essay. The curatorial premise was to exhibit artworks and ephemera, as cultural artifacts – as opposed to masterpieces. The idea was to see the show as a matrix of cultural production, mapping the collaborations, and the theoretical and social relationships embedded as content in the works themselves. 

I received a grant for the This is Paradise collective from the Canada Council for the Arts – we used this to pay the emerging curators and the artists to produce concurrent programming with the This is Paradise exhibition. We were given funding to produce a website (www.paradisenow.ca) and to produce video interviews with senior artists from diverse backgrounds about their fields. These included actor/play writer Linda Griffiths, cultural theorist Peggy Gale, and artists such as Vera Frenkel, John Brown, and Jenny Dean Hummer.

The purpose of the Paradise Now website was to create a record of the events in the spirit of service and community. Its all-inclusive nature was about finding resonances of ideas and conditions that are still effective to this day: the story of an art scene that lasted a very short time, but triggered a set of events and mythologies still in motion today.

The MOCCA exhibition is intended to create a model of the scene that was a seminal moment for a number of celebrated artists in the visual arts, theatre, music, and multi-disciplinary collaborative public projects. I wanted to recreate a model of the time, drawing connections between the makers of the work, when artists appeared as extras, models, back-up musicians, set designers, etc. in the work of others. Philip Monk described this phenomenon and the need to disregard the status to re-create a situation: 

By not distinguishing between these images in terms of status, we begin to see how the images may have functioned for that scene in picturing itself. Portraiture is the common element among the diverse material of magazines (FILE, Impulse, Impressions), bookcovers, ads, posters, art works, studio portraiture, film, videotapes, performance documentation, and “snapshots” of the scene.[i]

During the 1970s and especially into the 1980s, the boundaries between the disciplines blurred. Issues of High art and Low art became irrelevant.  In Toronto and other major cities – New York, London, West Berlin etc. – musicians went to art school and art students started bands. Expediency, urgency, as well as the drive to be authentic and audacious, were the context for much of the era. As Philip Monk puts it: “The art scene was a product of the 1970s, a fusion of two generations of artist – as countercultural hippie values from the beginning of the decade combined by its end with postmodernist new-wave ones.” [ii] 

ML: What was the process that went into the budgeting of the exhibition?

RJ: I presented a budget with my “dream show” estimates. David Liss suggested that we start with the dream version and see what is do-able. I broke down these costs as requested by David Liss.

Artist fees (original budget was 37 artists x CARFAC fees, which expanded to 47) and the transportation of the works were the greatest expenses, and limited the number of artists we could afford to exhibit. For the transportation of the works, I requested an estimate from a reputable art delivery company – based on my calculations of the delivery and return of over fifty works from as far away as Winnipeg.

I had already located the works that we wanted and had spoken directly with all of the artists beforehand. Additionally, I collected their contact information since the MOCCA’s policy requires us to contact the artists again – even when the works had already been borrowed from a collector or a museum. 

FM: It is important to address the link between the past and the present. How do you think Philip Monk’s Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years sets a stage for the This is Paradise exhibition in addressing the cultural happenings of that area in the 80s?

RJ: I read Philip Monk’s essay years ago, but it had not consciously affected my own reasoning about the exhibition. By rereading the essay, I now see many similarities in regard to the works with less status that create a model of activity, influences, and collaborations rather than a parade of masterpieces. My vision differs slightly because I was asked to feature the art and the music around the 80’s Cameron and use examples from Herb’s private collection. I had to think around these limitations and look at the artists who had the most impact and lasting influence – artists that are still in practice and whose works has the status. Like Philip, for us it was also an obvious choice to include George Whiteside. He was the court photographer and paparazzi for the General Idea, working closely with Jorge Zontal putting together the File Magazine. As Philip Monk also points out: “Collaboration was key to the success of creating a scene, where we documented ourselves through magazines, portraiture, video and performance.”[iii] ChromaZone was always a multi-disciplinary and a community oriented venture. The General Idea influenced us; we realized that creating a network of artists of all kinds was the new strategy – not the lone heroic figure.

I saw Philip Monk on the steps of the Art Gallery of Ontario. I mentioned that I had been asked by you to respond to his essay – that I had recently re-read it, and how I appreciated it. He said that he liked the exhibition at the MOCCA, which I considered a high praise. I told him that I had had a tiny taste of what curators like him and Fern Bayer, who was also standing there, devote their lives to. David Liss told me once: “You think we’re in the Art business, we’re in the people business.” He overstated this ironically. However, dealing with the perceived power, the pressure, the scrutiny of the criticism – or the praise for that matter – the experience of curating the MOCCA exhibition has given me a profound respect for the curators who produce exhibitions over and over again. 

The place where I diverge from Philip, with the greatest respect, is that I see the world through a painter’s eyes, even when looking through a camera. Painting was the dominant medium in the early to late 80s internationally and at home in Toronto.  Painting was also related to the Cameron project since it was the prevalent medium. Chromaliving had its office in the Cameron House in which Andy [Fabo], Donna Lypchuk, Tom Dean and others lived there for short periods of time.

Chromaliving had to be represented in the MOCCA exhibition, because it was the largest community-based exhibition at its time with over 10,000 in attendance. 

The videos in the MOCCA exhibition were chosen because of the large casts, the collaborations involved, and as a way to provide more context and cross-references with other works. 

When David Liss confirmed that we could borrow the collection from the National Gallery of Canada for the MOCCA exhibition, it opened new possibilities to extend the show about the history just prior to the Cameron scene. The drawings by Sandra Meigs were always on my mind. They are part of her film practice of the time. This interdisciplinarity was indicative of most art practices in the 80s.

The delicate drawings of Stephen Andrews and Julie Voyce visually bring everything down to the essence with no theatricality – smaller, quieter yet unequivocal. They had to be installed together; they are the more introspective response to the end of the 80s, AIDS, and the recession.

ML: Starting in the 1980s, Toronto witnessed a wave of artist-run galleries flooding the Queen West neighborhood. How do you think the proximity of the artists with different backgrounds helped the upheaval of the cultural vibrancy, and later the development, of the area? 

RJ: In the 1980s, Toronto had a very large white demographic. Traditionally, Canada had a strict immigration policy favoring the British immigrants, whereas quotas were set for certain perceived races or cultural groups. This was beginning to change during the Pierre Trudeau years when immigration policies loosened. He established a new policy to promote multi-culturalism – a cultural mosaic as opposed to the melting pot approach in the south of the border.  There were various influences: a revival of Indigenous identities, the Native Rights Movement, as well as the influence from the West Indies that brought reggae to Queen St. The postmodern critique of Colonialism was only beginning. We weren’t concerned with race, perhaps, because we were predominantly of the European descent and there were no other race per se. Our issues were concerned with feminism and homosexuality. Archaic marriage and other laws were, by definition, discriminatory. MSM sex (men who have sex with men) had been illegal, and punishable by imprisonment, until the late sixties. We grew up around the time of the debates about the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, etc. The Cold War and the threat of the atomic war were very real in our childhood. We were informed by all of these conditions while being part of the largest demographic and an economically privileged generation. We were interested in a person’s talent and work, not their race or religion.

FM: It has only been thirty years since the 1981 mass arrests in the Toronto’s gay community. Today, Canadian LGBTs benefit from some of the most advanced legal rights in the world. To what extent did the queer movement influence ChromaZone’s vision?    

RJ: Just before ChromaZone opened on September 15, 1981, Andy Fabo wrote a review for the Body Politic (the original gay publication in Toronto) on an exhibition called Terminal Building, curated by Chrysanne Stathacos. She invited the General Idea as well as myself and others to install a work around a Victorian Clock Tower building slated for demolition that was on the west side of the Bathurst Street.

I installed about 18 paintings on the windows to be read as a sequence, from the streetcars going to and from the old Exhibition grounds for the Blue Jays games. 

Andy smuggled me into The Barracks (Toronto’s oldest steambath, now closed) in the afternoon and posed bare-assed in the shower, etc. and I used the polaroids to make the centre of the sequence. The beginnings or ends – depending on where you were traveling – started with me turning on the TV, followed by TV, blue or grey color images of the Pope, Ronald Reagan, Terry Fox, Pierre Trudeau, the Queen, Cruise Missles, and then Police Chief Jack Akroyd. This piece was in solidarity with Andy and other gay men. So yes, we were part of the movement, even though we weren’t all gay.

Tim Jocelyn was one of the first artists to die from the AIDS related causes. The personal and professional loss was profound. My husband Clarke Rogers, the then Artistic Director, offered Theatre Passe Muraille as a place for a benefit for Andy and Tim. It raised $30,000.oo for the community. Additionally, there were painting auctions and performances by Molly Johnson, Holly Cole, Aaron Davis, and others. That was one of the last times our community really came together.

ML: Has the show received any critical feedback? And if so, how has it affected your stance towards the exhibition today?

RJ: There hasn’t really been any critical feedback. Murray White and Christopher Hume, who wrote articles for The Star, spoke with me extensively and reported on the scope of the project as a whole. I appreciate this, because it was good journalism and respected our profession enough by bringing the relevant research and intelligence to the interview and the articles.

Additionally, we have received the opinions of David Liss, Fern Bayer, Philip Monk, Dennis Reid, Bill Kirby, the Arts Council, the National Gallery, the Center for Contemporary Canadian Art, as well as the support of people like Peggy Gale, John Brown, Linda Griffiths, Dennis Burton, Vera Frenkel, etc. that let us interview them for the MOCCA exhibition.

I like the works in the exhibition, but that is not why they were chosen. They were chosen to indicate the exchange of thoughts and ideas and their collaborative aspect: A reflection of the moment.  I feel emotionally detached from that period. After all, it was thirty years ago. However, I still appreciate the works from the advantage of hindsight. 

A curatorial project of this scale teaches one that it is really about the work. 

I hope that there will be more exhibitions to come, by those who are interested in continuing the research about that period.

FM: Do you have any other curatorial projects planned in the near future? 

RJ: Yes, in Europe next year. It is too soon to talk about it but the research has already begun.

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[i] Philip Monk, “Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years,” C Magazine: International Contemporary Art, September/December 1998.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.