September 21 – December 1, 2019
The View from Here is a two-part installation located in Union Station’s Oak Room and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E. At Union Station, Jacob’s contemporary photographs are paired with the artist’s collection of rare maps and street views, representing different yet overlapping narratives of the same places. The tension between these views invites a reconsideration of Toronto’s identity and presumed cohesion as a city.
Jacob’s work explores different representations and ways of thinking about Toronto—a city where the very question of place is deeply layered, complex, and contested. The collection of maps begins with Giacomo Giovanni Rossi’s map, “L’America Settentrionale” from 1677, and moves through time, as layers of the city’s history accumulate.
Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and co-presented by Toronto Union.
Audio: Luis Jacob on CBC Metro Morning discussing his artworks at Union Station as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Air date: Nov 11, 2019.
November 2019 Program Schedule
Adopting maps, printed street-views, books, and the city’s landscape, artist Luis Jacob’s installation explores many of Toronto’s conflicting narratives. As a central dynamic of the project, situated at Union Station and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E, Jacob has invited a series of guest artists, researchers, and thinkers who, from their own research and practices, extend the context of his presented materials. From mapping forms of social storytelling, to understanding cultural belongings as repositories of relations, and working with printed matter as sites of neighbourhood organizing—each offering reveals another View from Here.
Simon Vickers
Monday, November 4, 2–4pm
259 Lake Shore Boulevard East
Fadi Masoud and Adrian Blackwell
Monday, November 18, 4–6pm
259 Lake Shore Boulevard East
Bonnie Devine
Monday, November 25, 2–4pm
Union Station
Bio
Luis Jacob (born in 1970, Lima, Peru; lives in Toronto, Canada) is an artist and curator. Since participating in documenta 12 (2007), he has achieved an international reputation with exhibitions at The Corner at Whitman-Walker, Washington, D.C. (2021); the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2019); the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2019), the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); the Taipei Biennial (2012); the Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); the Kunstverein Hamburg (2008); and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2008).
Exhibition Site
Union Station
From an architectural standpoint, Union Station has had many lives, but the landmark Beaux-Arts building we know today opened in 1927. At the time of its public opening, Union Station was situated near Toronto’s natural shoreline, which has since been extended south by more than a kilometer over the last century. Today, it is the most trafficked transit hub in the country. The station tells the complex story of how geological changes and urban infrastructure have come together to constitute the place we now call Toronto, a bustling city relatively divorced from its shoreline, sitting atop long-since buried waterways that served as our earliest routes of trade, transportation, and connection.
65 Front St W
Toronto ON
M5J 1E6