T-SHIRTS BY ARTISTS

featuring RAINER GANAHL Foreclosure

MARCH 4 - 15, 2009

Opening Reception Wednesday March 4, 7-10pm
@ Paul Petro Special Projects Space, 962 Queen St West

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with
STEPHEN ANDREWS
AMY BOWLES
PETER BOWYER
FASTWURMS
JOHN GREYSON
ANDREW HARWOOD
G.B. JONES
MICAH LEXIER
ALLYSON MITCHELL
JANET MORTON
WILL MUNRO
ED PIEN
FREESHOW SEYMOUR
SCOTT TRELEAVEN
JUSTUS ZELA
and others

Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present new work by New York-based artist Rainer Ganahl. Ganahl's work was featured at the 2007 Venice Biennial in the Italian Pavilion and the Arsenale. His exhibition MotherFatherDaughter was shown at our gallery in May-June 2008 and Bicycle in 2004. In 2000 Paul Petro Contemporary Art co-produced Ganahl's Basic Canadian, an exhibition comprised of photographs, videotaped interviews, a t-shirt and a poster, all of which explore the intersection of Canada's particular language/identity complex.

Rainer Ganahl provides the following statement for the current exhibition:

"Since the early 1990s I have been working with Please, teach me Japanese and other t-shirts as part of my art work. In 1999, while representing the Austrian Pavillion at the Venice Biennial I produced a piece that consisted of 50 t-shirts entitled: Please, teach me ... 50 languages spoken in countries that don't have any Pavillion at the Venice Biennial.

"With the arrival of Bush, I started to embroider on top of "I love NY" t-shirts with famous idioms uttered by W. G. Bush, from War on Terror, and Freedom Fries to Water Boarding. With the arrival of the current era of the financial and economic melt down, I'm taking on this new "nomenclatura" and in a cheaper, less labor intensive way than hand made embroidery I'm painting all the symptomatic terminology and names associated with the worst of it on the "I love NY" T-shirts: Securitization, Collateralized Debt Obligation, Credit Crunch, Lehmann Brothers, Toxic Assets etc . As with Evil Doer written on a t-shirt it is not always easy to wear them since who wants to have written Bankruptcy or Foreclosure on his/her breast?"

This exhibition includes one of the embroidered t-shirts and a Basic Canadian Please teach me Saulteaux t-shirt. Here is a link to Ganahl's web site and documentation of his t-shirt projects. http://www.ganahl.info/tshirts.html

In addition to t-shirts there are sweater snakes by Janet Morton and reconstructed underwear by Will Munro.