Dreams from the Ford plant, an aunt’s treasured rug and ‘soup joumou’: 25 artists make us feel what they felt growing up in the Toronto area

Unlike the last exhibit — “GTA21,” which launched in the middle of the pandemic — this show includes a more intergenerational collection of artists, with senior figures including June Clark and Tim Whiten, who are both in their 80s, sharing gallery space with younger artists such as Michael Thompson, who got his BA in fine art in 2019. Two of the artists, Matthew Wong and P. Mansaram, have passed on. 

“The artists in that first show were all born between 1970 and the 1990s,” said Kate Wong, who moved from London, England, in the fall of 2022 to become MOCA’s curator. She curated “GTA24” with Ebony L. Haynes and Toleen Touq. 

“When we came together to share our lists of potential artists, there were artists early in their careers, mid-career artists and more senior figures,” said Wong at a recent media preview before the exhibit’s public launch. “All of us included artists who had passed away, even though we hadn’t discussed that beforehand.”

Haynes, the only one of the curators born and raised in the GTA, said she still remembers being in Brampton when the city was amalgamated and area codes suddenly divided the city into 416s and 905s. 

“I remember being suspicious,” said Haynes, who now lives in New York. “What did being included in this ‘Greater Toronto’ mean? How did that make us a part of the city? It felt like downtown and us. I was the one in the team who understood how it felt to be grouped together for the first time and how that affected things like travel and transportation. We still call it the 6ix.”

With more than 25 artists assembled in MOCA’s three-storey building, as well as in surrounding areas — Lisa Myers has assembled an audio walk exploring the Sterling Road neighbourhood, while Richard Fung, with four other artists, dishes up “Substitution: A Meal” at Roncesvalles United Church in mid-May — are any themes obsessing them in this divided times?

“All the artists seem to be reflecting on identity,” said Haynes. “And what’s interesting seeing them grouped together is that their identities all have ties to the GTA, whether they live here now or not.” 

For her part, Wong hopes viewers come away from “GTA24” with questions. 

“I don’t want the exhibit to provide any answers,” she said. “I don’t think that’s what art does. I want people thinking critically about what place means and how we all relate to it.” 

Sukaina Kubba

One of the first works viewers see when entering the MOCA building is “Enclave Exclave,” a wall-mounted grouping of Sukaina Kubba’s colourful “sculptural drawings” made of painted PLA filament.

The Baghdad-born artist became obsessed with a rug that had been in the family of an Oakville aunt and uncle for generations. 

“I’d never seen a rug quite like it,” explained Kubba, who grew up in Abu Dhabi, moved to Montreal and studied art in Glasgow before moving to Toronto in 2019. “There are these little islands or vignettes telling different scenes. There’s some Christian iconography, which I think is Armenian. And there are fish and bird motifs.”

Kubba has been working with painted 3D filament for nearly two years. It allows her to create something that, she said, “hovers between being a drawing and sculpture, with some relation to textiles, too.” 

She likes working with textiles because of their connection to family history as well as travel, trade, commerce and migration patterns.

When she’s painstakingly creating her art, she likes to think about the labour that went into the original work: artisans taking the time and patience to weave and stitch each inch.

“I’m interested in where these rugs came from, how they were rolled, packaged, displayed. Unlike a lot of art, sometimes the provenance is lost with rugs and the makers are unknown.”

June Clark 

Harlem-born photographer June Clark moved to Toronto in the late 1960s and soon began documenting the city around her in a way that now presents a time capsule of a certain time and place. The 16 photographs in “GTA24” were captured in the 1970s and ’80s. 

One striking untitled photograph, she said, was taken during the construction of the 52 Division police station in the mid-’70s. She was walking along Dundas Street West and saw a Black delivery boy on a bicycle looking on at the construction site. Given the evolution of police relations, the subject has only gained in power and resonance in the decades since it was taken. 

Clark said the diversity of Toronto decades ago was phenomenal. 

“New York, where I had come from, was diverse, but it was in pockets. In Toronto, everyone was living cheek by jowl. They weren’t in volunteer ghettos, the way it can happen. And that was amazing to see.” 

Another prescient photograph captures a sign about an amendment to a zoning byline to permit new construction. Someone has painted a big “NO” over it. Clark is sad that the city she once knew has changed so much, with neighbourhoods such as Eglinton West’s “Little Jamaica” about to disappear. 

“It’s too bad so much has to be monetized,” she said. “We didn’t have the kind of construction you see now back in the ’70s. It’s extraordinary what money does to a city.” 

Even a photo of skaters at the rink at City Hall — something you might think is timeless — is caught at a certain moment. One of the skaters is wearing a Ryerson jacket (Ryerson University has since been renamed Toronto Metropolitan University). 

“This whole historical erasure movement is sad,” said Clark. “We’ve seen it in the States. If you erase something, people don’t have a chance to learn. Maybe in 10 years, this new history will also be wiped out. It’s too easy to wipe people right out of the books.” 

Ésery Mondésir

In Ésery Mondésir’s short film “What Happens to a Dream Deferred,” a group of Haitian immigrants, also aspiring rappers, are in a kitchen in Tijuana, Mexico. It’s New Year’s Day and they’re making a soup called “soup joumou,” a dish Haitians all over the world prepare and eat to remind them of Haiti’s independence from the French in 1804. 

The migrants are hoping to move to America, but Trump is in office and has called Haiti, El Salvador and African countries “sh—thole nations.” So, to borrow a line from Langston Hughes’ famous poem “Harlem,” their dream is being deferred. 

“One of the things I was trying to do with the film was start a new conversation about migration,” said Mondésir, who moved to Toronto in 2008. “There have been conversations about migration, but they’re always framed in terms of crisis, a problem to solve. What if migration was not that?

“Migration can also mean movement, change, hybridity, new identity formation. Embracing migration requires us to look at the world — and our society — differently. We don’t have to look at it as a problem. Even here in Toronto recently there was a talk about housing, with the mayor’s office framing the lack of housing being caused by refugees. But what if we thought, ‘OK, we are all part of the same world. Folks have been migrating for thousands of years. These folks here are part of who we are.’”

Mondésir smiled when I asked whether the film is documentary or fiction. He calls it “creative nonfiction.” The people in the film aren’t trained actors and the events — like Trump’s offensive statement — and situations are real. 

“I’m not making any claim to objectivity,” he said. “The story I’m telling is a very personal one for me. There’s no acting going on, but you could ask now if I’m performing for you and you’re performing for me. There’s always a performance going on.” 

Catherine Telford Keogh 

Toronto artist Catherine Telford Keogh now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. A while ago, an Amazon packaging plant opened near her studio by the Gowanus Canal. The installation artist had always been interested in making a piece informed by a conveyor belt, but had never had the opportunity. 

So when she got the commission for “GTA24,” she realized this was her chance.

She visited the Amazon plant and saw its conveyor systems, but she was more interested in the packages sitting like alien objects on the slides. She also got excited by the history and architecture of the MOCA building itself, which used to be a car manufacturing facility.

“I’m fascinated by the history of assembly line manufacturing and the ways in which these systems changed or remade the workers’ bodies,” she said. “Ford was obsessed with the body of the worker and would systematize the lives of his auto workers. All of their time was regimented according to the assembly line structure.”

Her installation, called “Carriers (Gravity-Fed),” wraps around a big concrete column on the gallery’s second floor and contains stainless-steel conveyor rollers from a decommissioned packaging facility near Montreal, glass containers that look like they’re plastic and inside these containers are a variety of things, including sludge from the bottom of the Gowanus Canal.

Um … sludge? 

“Yes, sediment that has been studied and includes coal tar, mercury, gonorrhea: lots of things have been found in there.” The containers are carefully wrapped and include bits of other more recognizable things, including bathtub stoppers, Mars Bar wrappers and expired lottery tickets. 

“I’m interested in storage containers because of the ways in which they propose a separation between the outside environment and the vacuum inside it. You can look at stagnation, decay and decomposition. Add to that the fact that most containers are made of plastic, which is itself formed from fossil fuel waste — this ancient geological material — and it’s fascinating,” she said.

Michael Thompson 

It’s not a coincidence that Michael Thompson’s three oil paintings hang on a wall not far from Telford Keogh’s assembly line installation. Thompson was inspired by his familial connection to the auto industry. 

“My dad worked for a Ford plant, and so did his dad and his dad’s father,” said Thompson. “On my mother’s side, my grandfather worked at a Ford plant and so did a great-uncle. And I worked there during summers and breaks.” 

Thompson, who was born in London, Ont., but is now based in Toronto, said manufacturing imagery is present, perhaps even subconsciously, in his new works, which were commissioned for “GTA24.” One striking painting looks like a fashion-forward garment but is in fact a PPE suit you wear when working with molten metal. It’s next to a painting featuring a stylish mirrored coat. Both clothing items are in the foreground before mass-produced items including coat hangers and rubber gloves. 

“Both items have this shiny, reflective surface, and I thought that was interesting in front of more utilitarian items like coat hangers and gloves,” said Thompson. “I see both paintings as related to one another, like sister works.”

Thompson points to London’s long-standing regionalist art movement, in which artists made work about the area and industry, in opposition to a metropolitan centre like Toronto. After the London Ford plant closed, his father and he were forced to commute east to GTA plants in Brampton. 

“I thought about the decline of the auto industry and what that means to an economy that relies on it heavily,” he said. “It forced people to move somewhere else for work. All that made me think about communities and how people come in and out of them, which is a big part of this show.” 

“Greater Toronto Art 2024” runs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 158 Sterling Rd., until July 28.  See moca.ca for information.