The Tim Jocelyn Collection
| Date | Nov 9, 1995 - Mar 17, 1996 |
|---|---|
| Artist | Tim Jocelyn |
| Curated by | Sybil Goldstein and The Tim Jocelyn Art Foundation |
Exhibition Overview
"I have always been interested in clothing as an art form and I believe what we wear influences and expresses our lives. There are surface design traditions in every culture and a tradition of artists creating works of art specifically to be worn. Many artists, including Picasso, Matisse and Sonia Delauney, have worked in the 'wearables' medium. All of these traditions contribute to what I am trying to achieve in my work." Tim Jocelyn, 1985
This 1995 exhibition presents an overview of the artistic oeuvre of Toronto artist Tim Jocelyn, including clothing, banners, wall panels, screens and furniture.
Additional Information
When Tim Jocelyn died from an AIDS-related illness at age 34 in 1986, he left behind a legacy of love and talent unequalled in the Toronto art scene. Anyone who knew Tim was touched by his elegance, wit and generosity of spirit. When it was obvious he was succumbing rapidly to AIDS, his friends organized the Ooga Booga Benefit at Theatre Passe Muraille. The city's finest singers, musicians and artists gathered in front of an over-capacity crowd to express their feelings for Tim, both the man and the artist.
Tim Jocelyn's brief yet significant contribution to Toronto's Queen Street art scene began in 1981, when he and Andy Fabo organized The Fashion Show, Jaywalking the Intersection of Fashion & Art at the Theatre Centre. Tim had the unique ability to bring together diverse groups of artists who worked to create an art event that was closer to a "happening" than a show. This culminated with Chromaliving in 1983, a rare, watershed exhibition of 150 artists, designers, performers and installation artists at the Colonnade on Bloor Street.
Tim originally defined himself as a "Fashion Artist," but in less than a decade, his production moved from brocaded vests and appliquéd garments to papercuts and kinetic sculpture. From silk to MACtac, any material Tim used was transformed into an art form that was both stunning and unique.
It has been almost 10 years since Tim's passing, yet his work remains as vital and innovative today as it was when it was created. This exhibition presents the range of Tim Jocelyn's artistic output. Featured are examples of his screens, banners, clothing and furniture, along with some of the papercuts produced for the Astrolabe at Expo '86. This is an opportunity to view the collection as a whole and to remember an artist whose memory and work will remain forever young.
Sybil Goldstein
The Tim Jocelyn Collection
By Peter Day, 1995
Tim Jocelyn was an associate member of ChromaZone, the Toronto artist collective formed in 1981. ChromaZone was a messy affair but in its brief existence, nothing was safe from panoramic examination of contemporary life and culture.
Chromaliving (1983) was one of such celebrations through "artistic" squatting. By legally occupying an abandoned fashion store in Toronto's carriage trade district for a month, Chromaliving was more than an exhibition; it was an event that dismissed the institutional didactic grid, even though many of the participants did not realize it at the time.
Painting, sculpture, fashion, installations, murals and ephemera were jumbled together, not to pronounce new cultural signs, but to hip-check existing ones. Art became style, became decoration in a cross-generational, multi-tasking and cheeky atmosphere. Jocelyn was instrumental in realizing Chromaliving, both as a principal organizer and more importantly, because he imbued the proceedings with his spirit of adventure and generosity.
Jocelyn's own events or performances (those which were claimed as his "invention") turned away a singular authorship to embrace the participants and acknowledge the audience. Dressing Up (1984), an evening of anarchic fashion and performance at Harbourfront in Toronto overshadowed the exhibition of art clothing, which it was intended to "celebrate." Dressing Up was apocalyptic, arty and sexy, and an all too rare public event. Even in rehearsal, such as it was, there was no clear indication of what was to come. The conclusion was chaotic and exhilarating, as was the response to Jocelyn's showman-like appearance.
But this is an incomplete portrait. Jocelyn was part instigator and part "bricoleur." In looking for host structures for his own work, he covered surfaces, from clothing to furniture, with cultural emblems and signs. Jocelyn's non-utilitarian banners were first shown publicly in a group exhibition at Toronto's outdoor sculpture garden in 1984. This was followed by the Ooga Booga Suite exhibition at the Burlington Cultural Centre in 1985. Ooga Booga was the title attached to a loose and ongoing activity of elevating banal objects such as chairs and tables to ritualistic and fetishistic heights.
Jocelyn also continued to construct other surfaces such as a series of folding screens. His freewheeling association of "native" imagery, post-pop design and time-warp classicism was a pictorial exoticism, which would now be subject to a revisionist interpretation. There is a current backlash to anything that smacks of cultural colonialism and the distinction of so-called "low sign" cultural motifs in a high culture (Western) context. Jocelyn was not consciously attempting to misinterpret, appropriate, or convert us to a new hedonism at the expense of "other" cultures. Nor was he attempting to gain converts to gay subculture sensibility. The spontaneous and kinetic field of cutouts was offered as pleasure and wry commentary on the state of Western culture, without suffering the burden of being "correct." It is unfortunate that Jocelyn's graphic style became co-opted by advertising for a tropical bohemia.
Jocelyn did not view design and art as mutually exclusive activities, but in its cross-movement, it served as a form of democratic action and social levelling. Historical influences were never far below the surface; the constructivist forms of Rodchenko, Goncherova and Popova, the Futurist Giacomo Balla, and Matisse's late cutouts. It is ironic that the issue of artists establishing style is rarely raised, yet Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Keith Haring and others, all engaged in some form of populist image-making.
With New Dimensions Astrolabe, commissioned for Expo '86 in Vancouver, Jocelyn found structural form for that all too rare of breeds - Canadian icons. The Astrolabe images are carefully selected and tame compared to Ooga Booga. Jocelyn's attempt to provide an iconographic field of Canadiana, nonetheless pushes against the well-scrubbed Canadian image: a satellite, an astronaut and a Tom Thomson landscape (our equivalent of Grant Wood's American Gothic), as well as familiar beaver, moose and Canada geese. Astrolabe indicates that Jocelyn was not attempting to unify design with art or to radicalize art through design; rather, he was keeping both in his field of view. History, culture, production and labour are all implicit in this work.
© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada
