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Dancing With the Stars
Emily Holton’s tabloid art By Jason McBride
Karl Lagerfeld performs a briss
Image credit: Emily Holton
Emblazoned on the home page of the Web site for the Centre for Culture and Leisure No. 1 is a quote from superstar philosopher Slavoj Zizek: “I have this terrible desire to fake things at this level; to fake institutional things. I think that everything to do with institutions should be faked.” It’s a terse manifesto for this most idiosyncratic of art galleries, an anti-institution housed in the loft of husband and wife Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz. The couple, artists and writers both, created the 500-square-foot space with the intention that it would operate for only a year, celebrate the playful and experimental, and (pace the Drake) be a pillar of the Parkdale community, artistic and otherwise. Since October, they’ve shown work by curator-artists Philip Monk and Dave Dyment; future exhibitions will include multidisciplinarians Darren O’Donnell, Jon Sasaki and Katie Bethune-Leaman. The CCL No. 1’s holiday show is devoted to art by Toronto-based Emily Holton, whose next book will be released in 2007 by Conundrum. Cheekily entitled Celebrity Hand Jobs, the show features drawings on small pieces of vellum that depict a variety of A- and B-listers engaged in all manner of salacious activity. (Sample caption: “Helen Mirren’s still got it!”) In a wry style that’s as deliberately crude as its sentiment, the work recalls the punk-pop sass of Raymond Pettibon and the whimsical menace of Shary Boyle. If only Hello! were so hilarious.—Jason McBride
Emily Holton. Artwork $200. Dec. 7 to Jan. 11 (closed Dec. 21 to Jan. 3). Centre for Culture and Leisure No. 1, 83 Elm Grove, Unit 102, www.joyland.ca/index.html/center-home.htm
TEST Originally published November 2006
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