John Monteith
John Monteith graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from Parsons, the New School for Design (2008) and his BFA from The Ontario College of Art and Design University (1997).
While prioritizing a practice that considers conceptual, material, and aesthetic concerns equally, Monteith consistently works across mediums, pushing and expanding rigid disciplinary boundaries whether through photography, painting, drawing, textile-making, or curation and collaborative initiatives. Informed by cities that bear a diverse history of the built form in their articulation of spatial dynamics and representational politics Monteith’s practice draws on issues of identity, memory, and history.
He has exhibited internationally at the Tate Modern, London, the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, X Initiative, New York, the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei, the DUMBO Art Center, New York, 7th Beijing Biennale, Beijing, and Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City.
John Monteith & Lou Sheppard: “Signal to Noise”
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 1st from 12-4pm
Exhibition Introduction by Travis Jeppesen
Senior Editor Artforum Magazine
Protagonists in the burgeoning Queer Abstraction movement, which attempts to transcend “mere” representations of the body in an effort to forge effervescent and divergent spatiotemporal relations that effectively expand increasingly conventional notions of what constitutes queerness, John Monteith and Lou Sheppard have conjoined pathways in Signal to Noise, a collaborative exhibition – complementary works that are constantly reflecting and refracting. This complementariness is embedded in a shared interest in architecture and built environments. For Monteith, the departure point is a long-standing interest in Brutalist and Modernist structures he has encountered in his home cities and on his myriad travels, often in countries that have seen their fair share of oppression and war; for Sheppard, as a musician and sound artist, it is the interiors of abandoned industrial sites that have historically been reclaimed as nightlife refuges for queers and their allies – sites that Monteith has also long frequented.
On the other hand, it could be remarked that Monteith and Sheppard have little in common as artists, save for a shared instinct to constantly break down and reconstitute the real, each on his own distinct terms. Departing from the most obvious difference – that is, the visual/sonic dichotomy – Monteith and Sheppard are here seen to erect twin structures, each out of his own medium.
Monteith’s works have taken the form of paintings, drawings, photographs, and textiles, though at their heart, there is the same consistent painterly impulse. Seen from the distance of reproduction, it is easy to mistake his work as being firmly ensconced in the language of classical geometric abstraction. Encountering these works in person, however, quickly robs one of such illusions. In fact, beyond his obvious skills as a colorist, with a highly refined and selective palette of pastels, Monteith’s is fundamentally a drawing-based practice. In his latest textile works – inspired in part by the knitting and cross stitching he learned from his Mother as a child – he unites his long-standing interest in urban architectural form with the generative beats of electronic music, which he listens to in his studio as he is making these works. The inherent spatial qualities of techno are reflected in the ways in which Monteith intuitively represents space in these works – which is also reflected in the title his ongoing suite of drawings, Resonances.
Senior Editor Artforum Magazine
Protagonists in the burgeoning Queer Abstraction movement, which attempts to transcend “mere” representations of the body in an effort to forge effervescent and divergent spatiotemporal relations that effectively expand increasingly conventional notions of what constitutes queerness, John Monteith and Lou Sheppard have conjoined pathways in Signal to Noise, a collaborative exhibition – complementary works that are constantly reflecting and refracting. This complementariness is embedded in a shared interest in architecture and built environments. For Monteith, the departure point is a long-standing interest in Brutalist and Modernist structures he has encountered in his home cities and on his myriad travels, often in countries that have seen their fair share of oppression and war; for Sheppard, as a musician and sound artist, it is the interiors of abandoned industrial sites that have historically been reclaimed as nightlife refuges for queers and their allies – sites that Monteith has also long frequented.
On the other hand, it could be remarked that Monteith and Sheppard have little in common as artists, save for a shared instinct to constantly break down and reconstitute the real, each on his own distinct terms. Departing from the most obvious difference – that is, the visual/sonic dichotomy – Monteith and Sheppard are here seen to erect twin structures, each out of his own medium.
Monteith’s works have taken the form of paintings, drawings, photographs, and textiles, though at their heart, there is the same consistent painterly impulse. Seen from the distance of reproduction, it is easy to mistake his work as being firmly ensconced in the language of classical geometric abstraction. Encountering these works in person, however, quickly robs one of such illusions. In fact, beyond his obvious skills as a colorist, with a highly refined and selective palette of pastels, Monteith’s is fundamentally a drawing-based practice. In his latest textile works – inspired in part by the knitting and cross stitching he learned from his Mother as a child – he unites his long-standing interest in urban architectural form with the generative beats of electronic music, which he listens to in his studio as he is making these works. The inherent spatial qualities of techno are reflected in the ways in which Monteith intuitively represents space in these works – which is also reflected in the title his ongoing suite of drawings, Resonances.
Installation view - Rachel Topham Photography
This is where the connection to Sheppard’s sonic practice comes in. Responding directly to the rhythmicality of shape and color of the drawings from which Monteith’s tapestries were created, as well as the cryptic architectural content which is a further connecting line between the two artists’ oeuvres, Sheppard has engineered a new work, Choir (D’Abraxas, Minskaya, Southbank), that consists of six-single-channel audio installations arranged in the gallery space. In fact, Sheppard viewed Monteith’s works as graphic scores that could be “played,” while simultaneously imagining their layered interiors as filled with reverberating sound. This synaesthetic approach is an extension of Sheppard’s ongoing engagement with “sounding,” which originally entailed locating the depth of the ocean floor by sending a lead weight to its bottom, and was later revised to mean sending a sound wave to those depths in order to have it bounce back as an echolocation; Sheppard’s approach thus posits a new means of spatial perception.
The loop of the resulting work spans several hours, and is programmed to generate in different iterations, as each channel plays in varied configurations; visiting the exhibition on several occasions, the listener is bound to have a different experience each time: an effect further exacerbated by Sheppard’s creation of a revised sense of echolocation, wherein sounds are reflected back in their harmonics, and in which each of the channels reflects the harmonics of the other as a way of imagining a disjointed, atemporal echolocation. This, in turn, will inevitably update and reverse previous notions one has arrived at, not only of Sheppard’s work, but of Monteith’s in turn. For this reason, there is an inherent movement of unpredictability, of restlessness to this exhibition – which mirrors, perhaps, its artists’ own constant journeying forth, both literally and figuratively, into terrain that somehow manages to appear both familiar and otherworldly . One might argue that this reflects the layering of time as well as the multiple lives that these architectural structures at the core of the exhibition have traversed, and the ways in which queer life and desire have impacted these spaces through their reverberations.
The loop of the resulting work spans several hours, and is programmed to generate in different iterations, as each channel plays in varied configurations; visiting the exhibition on several occasions, the listener is bound to have a different experience each time: an effect further exacerbated by Sheppard’s creation of a revised sense of echolocation, wherein sounds are reflected back in their harmonics, and in which each of the channels reflects the harmonics of the other as a way of imagining a disjointed, atemporal echolocation. This, in turn, will inevitably update and reverse previous notions one has arrived at, not only of Sheppard’s work, but of Monteith’s in turn. For this reason, there is an inherent movement of unpredictability, of restlessness to this exhibition – which mirrors, perhaps, its artists’ own constant journeying forth, both literally and figuratively, into terrain that somehow manages to appear both familiar and otherworldly . One might argue that this reflects the layering of time as well as the multiple lives that these architectural structures at the core of the exhibition have traversed, and the ways in which queer life and desire have impacted these spaces through their reverberations.
Taking in these two bodies of work together – the ways in which they fade in and out of synaesthetic synchronicity with one another – one comes to realize a hidden mission of Queer Abstraction that has, to my knowledge, not yet been adequately articulated: namely, a reclamation of spaces previously codified as belonging to a hetero-capitalist world order; a re-gaining and re-counting of time outside the matrix of “productive” labor, syncopated and re-programmed into new potentialities of embodiment and inhabitance.
Across the Border, Tapestry Woven Cotton, 124 cm x 101cm , 2023
John Monteith has held residencies at CAT Cologne, Germany (2011), Kunsthalle Roveredo, Switzerland (2014), I Project Space, Beijing (2018) along with an upcoming residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai in fall 2024.
Reviews and essays dedicated to his work have been included in Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, Art in America (print and online), Charley, C Magazine, October, The Huffington Post, K-48, Petit Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public, the New Yorker and others.
Monteith has been awarded grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, and The Toronto Arts Council. He currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada where he is a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.
His work can be found in the following collections of note, the Canadian Embassy, Ankara, Tricon Residential, San Francisco, Majudia, Montreal, Bank of Montreal, Toronto, The New School, Manhattan, New York, Torys LLP, Toronto, TD Bank, Toronto, BNY Melon, New York, Morris and Associates, London.
Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments. Lou has performed and exhibited across Canada, notably at The Art Gallery of York University, The Confederation Centre for the Arts, and as part of the first Toronto Biennial, as well as internationally, at Kumu Kunstimuuseum in Estonia, in the Antarctic Biennial, and at Titanik Gallery in Finland. Lou has participated in numerous residencies, including the International Studio Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, NY., La Cité des Arts in Paris, and as participant and faculty at The Banff Centre. He has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018 and 2021, and was one of 25 winners in 2020. Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/ Nova Scotia.
Reviews and essays dedicated to his work have been included in Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, Art in America (print and online), Charley, C Magazine, October, The Huffington Post, K-48, Petit Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public, the New Yorker and others.
Monteith has been awarded grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, and The Toronto Arts Council. He currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada where he is a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.
His work can be found in the following collections of note, the Canadian Embassy, Ankara, Tricon Residential, San Francisco, Majudia, Montreal, Bank of Montreal, Toronto, The New School, Manhattan, New York, Torys LLP, Toronto, TD Bank, Toronto, BNY Melon, New York, Morris and Associates, London.
Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments. Lou has performed and exhibited across Canada, notably at The Art Gallery of York University, The Confederation Centre for the Arts, and as part of the first Toronto Biennial, as well as internationally, at Kumu Kunstimuuseum in Estonia, in the Antarctic Biennial, and at Titanik Gallery in Finland. Lou has participated in numerous residencies, including the International Studio Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, NY., La Cité des Arts in Paris, and as participant and faculty at The Banff Centre. He has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018 and 2021, and was one of 25 winners in 2020. Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/ Nova Scotia.
Travis Jeppesen is the author of the novels Victims, Settlers Landing, Wolf at the Door, and The Suiciders, as well as two volumes of poetry and a collection of art criticism, Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the “Contemporary”. In 2018, his book See You Again in Pyongyang, about his time living and studying in North Korea, was published. His essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Artforum, Afterall, Art in America, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Bookforum, Spike, Frieze, and Mousse, among other publications. In 2024, he was named a Senior Editor of Artforum.
In 2014 he wrote the feature film The Coat, directed by Christophe Chemin, and in April 2023, Jeppesen’s latest play, Ghosts of the Landwehr Canal, premiered at Berliner Ringtheater under the direction of Ping-Hsiang Wang.
His calligraphic and text-based artwork has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Jeppesen holds a PhD in Critical Writing in Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, and previously served as assistant professor at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Industry at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
In 2014 he wrote the feature film The Coat, directed by Christophe Chemin, and in April 2023, Jeppesen’s latest play, Ghosts of the Landwehr Canal, premiered at Berliner Ringtheater under the direction of Ping-Hsiang Wang.
His calligraphic and text-based artwork has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Jeppesen holds a PhD in Critical Writing in Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, and previously served as assistant professor at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Industry at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
C Magazine by Xenia Benivolski
