You may recall seeing posters around town of a hand drawn gentleman with the name “Andrew” underneath a few years ago. I took a photo one of the last remaining ones in early 2012 on construction hoarding at Bay and Grosvenor, and took another when I was visiting Berlin (read that story here). Mysterious at first, the story broke in late 2010 that artist Shaan Syed was behind them, and that the project existed in Toronto, Berlin, and London. Now Syed has completed a book documenting the anonymous work and how the public interacted with it. His Toronto launch is Saturday, with a talk by U of T’s John Paul Ricco. The book is being sold at a discount for $20 (normally $30) at the event.
WHEN: Saturday Nov 23rd 2013, 4-7pm, Talk begins 4:30 sharp
WHERE: Scrap Metal Gallery. 11 Dublin Street, Unit E
RSVP recommended: info @ shaansyed com
Scrap Metal Gallery is pleased to host the launch of Shaan Syed’s The Andrew Project book. Syed has invited Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, Media Teory and Criticism at the University of Toronto, John Paul Ricco, to share some of his own work, and for the occasion, Ricco will give a short talk, “On the Commerce of Anonymity (a talk on passing by, and a few other pleasures)”.
The Andrew Project book is the culmination of an anonymous public art intervention by artist Shaan Syed. Between 2010 and 2013, Syed fly-posted Toronto, Berlin and London with over one thousand portrait line drawings of a man, accompanied by the name Andrew. The book, co-published by S1 ArtSpace (Sheffield UK) and FormContent (London UK), documents the graffiti and public interaction that resulted from the portraits appearing on the city streets. The publication features contributions from several international artists including Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay; Foreign Correspondent for ABC, Jeffrey Kofman; and writer and critic, Chris Fite-Wassilak (Frieze, ArtMonthly, ArtReview, ArtPapers). Exploring ideas around urbanism and location; advertising, image and abstraction; absence versus presence, and the personal as it relates to the public, The Andrew Project “is a melancholic, philosophically ruminating one; a rather beautiful paean to absence” -ArtReview
Shaan Syed (b.Toronto, lives in London UK) is an artist whose practice questions distinctions made between established notions of abstraction and representation as they relate to loss and gain in the painting process. He shows internationally and is represented by Birch Contemporary (Toronto) and Galerie Michael Janssen (Berlin).
John Paul Ricco is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, Media Theory, and Criticism at the University of Toronto. Ricco has taught at Texas Tech University, has been Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal, and guest editor for Parallax and the Journal of Visual Culture. In 2007/2008, Ricco curated a two-part exhibition on contemporary international queer video: “Love in a Time of Empty Promises,” and “Sex is So Abstract” at Vtape in Toronto. He is author of several published essays and monographs including The Logic of the Lure (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), and The Decision Between Us: Art & Ethics in the Time of Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Ricco is currently at work on his third monograph; Non-Consensual Futures: Pornographic Faith and the Economy of the Eve.
