A playground can be seen as the societal introduction to structured conformity. Objects are placed within a logical plan. Concerns for safety are addressed. Rules for proper play are displayed. Parents stand at a safe distance and observe. Children are encouraged to play.

A playground can also be seen as the introduction to creative possibilities. Children are placed in an environment and left to their own devices. Large structures can be used as intended by adults or serve as points of departure for creative play. A swing set could become an obstacle coarse. A slide could become the roof to a castle.

The practice of an artist can be seen as creative play. Working within the structures of society they challenge, confront, alter, redirect and at times make fun of our constructed world.

This exhibition looks at the playground to try to understand the nature of play in terms of artistic production.

Patrick Macaulay is Head of Visual Arts at Harbourfront Centre.

In dealing with the subject of "childhood" and its concomitant backdrops, this body of work explores languor as a particular quality of childhood. It offers a glimpse into a non-material realm as it illustrates a cognitive experience within a cultural construct. In Benny, the subject exists in an ambivalent state between the real and hyper-real realms while challenging the decorum of contemporary hegemony within the domestic construct.

Raffy Ochoa, Benny, 2007. 20" x 25" archival inkjet prints.
Image courtesy of the Artist.

Raffy Ochoa's work examines the fantastical reality of the contemporary experience through various image-oriented mediums. His practice explores the phenomena of subjective experience, projections of reality and cultural myth within the ever-changing contemporary landscape. Ochoa is currently completing his BFA at the Ontario College of Art and Design and is the recipient of the 2008 Mark McCain Award and the 2008 Stephen Bulger Gallery Scholarship.

Nathalie Quagliotto, Maturity Correlation, 2009.
Swing seats, chains, and metal. 12'x5'x8'.
Image courtesy of the artist.

Nathalie Quagliotto's sculptural practice is rooted in taking everyday pre-fabricated public objects linked to childhood and reconfiguring them by disrupting their proximity and colour to the point in which they become socially tense and awkward situations for adults. Her work focuses on the experience of play as an aesthetic form and how such activity can be a method for people to work something out.

Nathalie Quagliotto is a sculptor living in Ontario and Quebec and is interested in relational practices. She received an MFA from the University of Waterloo in 2009 and a BFA from Concordia University in 2007. She has exhibited in Canada, the United States and Australia.

nathaliequagliotto.blogspot.com

My projects engage the audience through the juxtaposition of private and public space, appropriating and utilizing the form and function of these spaces. Recently, I have been building a new body of work that targets the means by which media, corporate and political interests control behaviour within public/private space: "Love Motel" is an environment of intrigue and suggestion created through the arrangement of aspects of a motel room; "Call Centre" is an interactive installation based on a call centre, incorporating regular inbound scripted calls; the audio installation "Extreme Centre" (created in collaboration with Millie Chen) is a built environment based on a maze that utilizes political and literary quotes of an extreme nature, the audio being disseminated as conspiratorial whispers via 32 speakers; "PED.Chongqing" and "PED.Rio" (made in collaboration with the PED collective) are part of an ongoing series of public interventions/events during which participants may embark on free bicycle 'lecture' tours with an audio system that is powered by pedaling and broadcast into public space.

Warren Quigley.
Image courtesy of the artist.

Warren Quigley has exhibited across Canada, the U.S., China, and in France, Brazil, and Japan. Recent exhibitions include Reverberation: 2008 International Video Art Exhibition at Yuangong Art Museum, Shanghai, at Tank Loft Contemporary Art Center, Chongqing, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shijiazhuang, China, in Extreme Centre at Centre culturel canadien, Paris, France and as part of Sound Symposium in St. John's, Newfoundland (in collaboration with Millie Chen), at FILE-Rio 2007: the Electronic Language International Festival, Telemar Cultural Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (in collaboration with the PED collective), Big Orbit Gallery, Buffalo, and Harbourfront Centre, Toronto. He has produced a number of permanent public art commissions, and his work is in private and public collections in Canada, the U.S.A. and Europe. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

warrenquigley.com

Lyla Rye’s work explores the perception of space by creating installations that draw the viewer into subtly illogical situations. Her goal is to throw the viewer slightly off balance; optically, physically and psychologically. By doing so, she creates a situation where subliminal assumptions about space can surface and be examined.

In the last five years she has been experimenting with the interaction of architectural and illusory space in videos of a dollhouse. This model home becomes a fantasy space through play. Projected at an architectural scale, it transforms into a virtual space. Rye also explores various projection strategies to confound one’s perception by blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion.

Lyla Rye, Interplay, detail, 2007.
Video projection, Scale Variable, 8m 54s, silent.
Image courtesy of Artist.

Interplay is based upon a model of a dollhouse constructed of plastic building blocks that becomes virtually inhabited by a young girl. The cohesive illusion of space is shattered through a many-layered process of filming. As a result, the viewer must mentally construct a model of the dollhouse as much as perceive it.

Lyla Rye is an installation artist who is based in Toronto. She began her studies in architecture, then received a BFA from York University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in San Francisco, New York, Adelaide, Paris and Berlin. She has work in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, York University, Cadillac Fairview Corporation and Robert McLaughlin Gallery. She recently created a permanent installation as part of Harbourfront Centre's Artists' Gardens programme in Toronto.

lylarye.com

Nicholas Shick grew up in the Prairies and has lived in both smaller communities and major centers.

"I am a hick in the big city, but somehow too urban for a small town. As a 21st-century queer Canadian man, I experience and navigate a social space between genders. My main body of work explores human behaviour."

Since 2004, Shick has been producing a series of large-as-life screen prints. Together the images of men create a non-linear narrative, offering up multiple perspectives on the ambiguities of ordinary life. Boredom, awkwardness, irresolution, peculiarity, alienation and anticlimax are regular elements of the social landscape. Everyday rituals and chance encounters reveal re-occurring themes of identity, relationships, queerness, connection and community.

Chase investigates the relationships between anger, fear and ambivalence.

Nicholas Shick, Chase (part 02), 2009.
Silkscreen and stencil on plywood, 80 inches x 45 inches.
Image courtesy of Artist.

Nicholas Shick started screen printing in Grade 8 in Winnipeg, MB. His first job in communication arts was correcting phone numbers on real-estate signage and then later worked as a graphic designer and art director. In pursuit of additional creative opportunities, he studied printmaking at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, and received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Shick incorporates photography, printmaking, digital imaging, book arts and graphic design into his work. He received the Don Phillips Scholarship from Open Studio, Toronto in 2004. He has exhibited in Halifax, Philadelphia, Montréal, Winnipeg and Toronto.

He has lead creative workshops for youth and adults at Ontario College of Art and Design, Open Studio, Sketch and Youth Arts Project! in Toronto, Art City and FTW Collegiate in Winnipeg, and LGB Youth Project in Halifax.

nickshick.com

In Rose Bianchini’s component of Keyframe, she brings together animation, drawing, crafts, and miniatures to create a series of dioramas. The dioramas reveal a narrative about a surreal and strange girl who lives in a dark and magical world. In this world birds are wiser than people and the star of the tale lives in a house in the sky, has a strident mother and sails to school each morning on the wind.

The work is not only whimsical and vibrant; it also brings together various art mediums, inviting the viewer to travel down the rabbit hole through a tapestry of textures and colour. It asks one to imagine a place where the strange is common and everyday events can be extraordinary. How does the girl in the dioramas enjoy her world of peculiar and playful happenings? And will she invite us along on her journey?

Rose Bianchini is an artist, director, producer and writer who works in several mediums. Her radio work includes creating music profiles and documentary work for CBC Radio. Her television work has included a youth culture show for TVO, The Big Picture with Avi Lewis and The Hour on CBC Television.

She has art directed several shorts and Bravo!Facts and most recently art directed a television pilot featuring headless zombies. As a director her most recent project is a music video for Gentlemen Reg which has aired on MTV, MuchMusic and several other broadcasters as well as several film festivals. She is directing a documentary feature about a social experiment artist and her Surreal Girl animation has been picked up for worldwide distribution. Bianchini is part of the art collective which created the Soft City — an ongoing plush metropolis installation that has been exhibited over a dozen times and is currently being developed as an immersive game and television series. She has also diligently worked on a graphic novel about a surreal girl who talks to birds and has psychic powers.

Currently, Rose is a resident of the Interactive Media Lab at the Canadian Film Center.

rosebianchini.com

We are still sleeping... 2009.
View of Luminato installation at The Box in BCE Place.
Image courtesy of artist.

Sarah Lazarovic’s work is about imbuing the digital with elements of the handmade. She relishes the opportunities afforded by digital technologies, but seeks always to reconcile the slick with the free-form. Regardless of theme, she works with as little as possible, economizing resources. In Keyframes, the boundaries between screen and surroundings are blurred by pulling elements from animation and creating a screening room for videos by taking animated elements and freezing them in time. In so doing, the ephemeral becomes permanent. Lines can be examined, props explored, details revealed. The distinction between materials is also blurred, as a jumble of surfaces are treated uniformly to unite their similarities and lay bare their differences.

Sarah Lazarovic is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. Her animation and film work has appeared in festivals and on television. Her most recent short film, The Way It Used To Be, premiered at the Worldwide Short Film Festival. She is presently at work on a series of twelve shorts, supported by a Chalmers Fellowship. Her cartoons are featured weekly in a handful of Canadian newspapers. In her spare time, she runs The Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada out of her garage.

sarahL.com

The installation Fridge Magnet 2 can be read as a meditation on the prosaic world of objects and everyday materials. The challenge of this installation was to somehow address the window as a point of confluence between public and private space. It acts as a threshold that draws passersbys into a deeper space, where playful possibilities are realized, opposites attract, histories overlap and static forms aspire toward fluid meanings.

Carlo Cesta, Fridge Magnet, 2008.
Fly Gallery, Toronto.

Carlo Cesta was born in Toronto in 1958. He studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada, completing a year of study in Florence, Italy and graduating in 1980. He has exhibited his works extensively since the early '80s. Cesta was a featured artist of Perspective 94 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. His exhibitions include: Dalgas Underground, Copenhagen, Denmark (1996), Rococo Tattoo (1997) the Power Plant, Toronto, (1997), Slowdownspeedfreak (2001), the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Beyond in Western New York (2005), Hallwalls, Buffalo N.Y., USA, Canadian Club (2005), Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, France, hic (2006) Installations and Interventions at Hart House, Toronto, and International House of Sunshine (2007), at the Diaz Contemporary, Toronto.

Carlo Cesta is represented by Diaz Contemporary, Toronto.

carlocesta.com

Are our abilities and inabilities to connect with others inherent? Or is that in an age of communication based upon a large degree of physical separation (telephone, email, instant messaging, etc.), have our abilities to communicate and connect diminished? If so, are these new forms of communication actual disguises for forms of self-pleasure, which in reality breed isolation?

Talking to People is Easy explores the complexities that surround communication and the barriers it encompasses. While these barriers may be self-imposed or externally applied, they aid in revealing elements of the human condition.

Alex Kisilevich,
from the series Talking to People is Easy, 2008-2009.
Image courtesy of Leo Kamen Gallery.

Alex Kisilevich is a photo-based artist living and working in Toronto, who holds BFAs from York University (Music, 2007) and OCAD (Photography, 2009). He is engulfed by the tragic and ironic and uses the storytelling capabilities of constructed narrative to manifest similar feelings of this. His work often conjures spaces of in-between where the lines between several emotions are blurred and the viewer is caught between the desire to smile and to feel disturbed.

His work has recently been selected for Flash Forward 2009, a book of emerging photo-based artists, published by Magenta Foundation. He is also the national winner of the BMO Financial Group’s 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition 2009. Upcoming exhibitions include group exhibitions in October at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and Lennox Contemporary, as well as a solo exhibition at Leo Kamen Gallery in November. He begins his MFA in Visual Arts at York University in September 2009.

alexkisilevich.com