In a 2010 interview, Bob Leroux, a vice-preseident and general manager with Pattison spoke about the company’s relationship with the festival: “We’d absolutely support them … it is our goal to expand the partnership. We like what they stand for in terms of bringing ideas and thought. Why should it just be in a gallery?” More than ever, Mr. Leroux said, outdoor companies are trying to make public art a part of their business. In Montreal, CBS Outdoor works with a group called Mouvement Art Public (MAP): in between paid campaigns, instead of throwing in filler ads for its own network, CBS has allowed MAP to show artists’ work using its signs.

This year, Pattison is a sponsor of 4 Toronto public installation projects.

The festival runs throughout the month of May.

Week-End – Alex Prager

Alex Prager is a self-taught artist whose intriguing photographs feature women dressed as starlets and femme fatales, embroiled in cinematic melodramas. Growing up in LA, the artist was immersed in an environment that embraced ideas of glamour and celebrity culture. While each photograph in the series Week-End (2010) tells its own story, together these images come across as film stills from tantalizingly incomplete narratives. Her enigmatic tableaus are reminiscent of a classic Hollywood era, with their supersaturated and enhanced colours, dramatic lighting, unexpected camera angles, and archetypal representations of beauty.

Prager’s signature style is influenced by fashion photography inasmuch as it draws upon films by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Douglas Sirk. For the artist, “a picture is a picture,” and it is irrelevant whether these images were produced for a gallery wall or for a fashion magazine. If anything, editorial shoots enable her to realize more ambitious projects that would otherwise be difficult to realize.

Surrounding a car dealership and autobody shop, this site-specific installation also evokes nostalgia for a time when film screenings could be enjoyed at the drive-in theatre. Presented as billboards, these seven images reveal the artist’s interest in advertising tropes, in the way they lure the viewer into make believe-worlds. Much like a fashion advertising campaign, her seductive photography heavily relies upon artifice and fabricated promises of happiness. By working with makeup, costumes, and poses–caked lipstick, fake eyelashes, wigs, and demure blank stares–Prager celebrates the trappings of femininity, to the extent that she makes it uneasy for the viewer to see beyond these constructed facades. Within each of these scenes there is an air of mystery present, as if the answer lurks just outside of the picture frame.

This was presented in partnership with Pattison Outdoor Advertising and Nikon Canada

South African photographer Pieter Hugo documents an expansive wasteland in Ghana and the inhabitants who live there. Rife with outdated technologies, this destitute slum known as “Sodom and Gomorrah” is also home to a marginalized community. Despite the devastatingly harsh realities depicted in Permanent Error (2010), many of these images are also aesthetically breathtaking classical portraits. Amidst the ravages of an industrialized world–mountains of discarded hard drives, keyboards, and monitors–locals confront the camera, revealing an inner strength and dignity.

The United Nations has stated that Western countries produce around 50 million tons of digital waste annually, and here the shocking consequences are exposed. As an installation situated within the urban surroundings of a parking lot, there is a heightened awareness of consumer culture and how the West has normalized its wasteful behaviours. Much of this debris is shipped over to developing countries, with the false promise that it will improve their economy. Many of the inhabitants in this wasteland survive by burning electronic components to extract copper and other precious metals, left with little choice but to create toxic firepits of melting plastic and black smoke. As a result, the surrounding landscape and rivers are contaminated with lead, cyanide, and mercury.

Marshall McLuhan theorized about the effects of technology and how its pervasiveness leads to new cycles of obsolescence and retrieval. He questioned what happens when a medium is pushed to its extreme. Hugo’s work reveals the dark underside of a culture that values “progress” above all else. This bleak graveyard of outdated electronic artifacts foreshadows an apocalyptic era, while harkening back to romanticized pastoral landscapes. These photographs are a stark reminder of the fragility of existence, not only of people and place, but of information and technology.

This was presented in partnership with Pattison Outdoor Advertising and Nikon Canada

Curated By Bonnie Rubenstein

Yesterday and last night, a group of artists and activists working throughout downtown removed ad posters from street-level advertising pillars, and painted billboards with whitewash. In place of the ads, they posted artwork.

The project, known to participants as the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover, or TOSAT, had been months in the making, and was highly organized. All involved were operating under strict secrecy.

The group planned to hit forty-one advertising pillars, and twenty to twenty-five 10′ x 20′ billboards. Most of the ads chosen for this treatment were property of Pattison Outdoor Advertising, an ad company that maintains many advertising signs of various types in Toronto. Billboards owned by CBS and Astral Media were also hit. TOSAT organizers claim that they specifically targeted ads that were illegal. Torontoist cannot say with certainty that any of them were.

All photos by D.A. Cooper/Torontoist

Related Article: How TOSAT Took Over Toronto’s Street Ad Space

Related Article: TOSAT Posts a Comprehensive Gallery of Its Work

Hank Willis Thomas makes artworks that visually decode the “what goes without saying” generalizations of race, class and history as seen in advertising. Appropriating the language of mass media, his photographs are reinserted back into the world of images, but with the added dissonance of the artist’s critique.

For CONTACT, Thomas commandeers billboards and street level posters at the corner of Front and Spadina to present images from three related series. The 16 works take a critical look at a range of issues relating to the representation of black identity in photography. In Fair Warning (2010), Thomas repurposes imagery from cigarette campaigns featuring African American models from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s. The Rebranded series (2010) looks at the ways “blackness” has been sold over generations. Remember Me (2010), presents a series of altered postcards, circa 1919, which honours the struggle of the anonymous millions who stood strong, during a period when society at large was designed to keep them down. Reviving images from the past for consumption in the present, Thomas’ CONTACT project challenges the voice of mainstream media by putting advertising’s influence to new use.

Hank Willis Thomas (born in Plainfield, NJ, 1976) is the winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness (2008). His work was featured in the 30 Americans exhibition at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming Photographers. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad and is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.

Presented in partnership with Pattison Sign Group.

From Marketing Magazine (November 25, 2009):
Outdoor ad campaign takes on Toronto’s outdoor ad tax

In response to an impending new law that would tax billboard advertising in Toronto, the Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada (OMAC) has launched an outdoor campaign to bring the issue out of city council chambers and into the streets.

OMAC objects to the estimated $10.4 million in new taxes, which it claims would outstrip estimated industry earnings of $8.8 million.

The new law goes before a council vote on Nov. 30 , and is scheduled to go into effect in July 2010.

The association put up 139 billboards yesterday–provided by Astral Media, CBS Outdoor and Pattison Outdoor–that drive curious passersby to CityBillboardTax.ca.

Copy on the billboards say “How can the City tax an industry more than it earns?” and “Any tax affects you. Even one on billboards.”

Rosanne Caron, president of OMAC, said the tax will act as “prohibition” on outdoor advertising, driving costs up for businesses and charitable groups that receive donated ad space.

“We feel it is critical to communicate what is truly at stake if the new sign by-law and tax are passed into law,” Caron said in a statement.

OMAC has asked the council to postpone the vote for one month to examine the law and “reach a workable solution for all stakeholders.”

Toronto Adscapes has been following this story. For related posts, check out…
Signing off?
Toronto’s Ad Busters