MASS MoCA’s curator Denise Markonish spent the last three years crisscrossing Canada to view hundreds of exhibitions in museums and galleries, visiting over 400 artists’ studios, and making connections with a full range of artists working in Canada today.

The exhibition will be mounted in the 14,000 sf comprising MASS MoCA’s first floor galleries, as well as additional indoor and outdoor spaces.

A comprehensive full-color 450-page catalogue by MIT Press will accompany the exhibition and will provide insights into Canada’s thriving contemporary cultural scene. Featuring artist-to-artist interviews, the book also includes contributions from notable Canadian writers including Douglas Coupland.

Oh, Canada
May 27, 2012–Apr 1, 2013

MASS MoCA
87 Marshall Street
North Adams, MA 01247, United States
+1 413 662-2111

(Pictured above – “Permanent Press Landscape”, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas)

Douglas Coupland exhibits at the Armory Show, a leading international contemporary and modern art fair and one of the most important annual art events in New York. The Armory Show takes place every March on Piers 92 & 94 in Manhattan.

March 8 to 11, 2012, New York

Read All Over considers and contrasts the state of language in books and visual art. Though the world is bombarded by words – flickering across LCD displays on computers, on telephones, on dashboards – they are barely there. The words are merely bytes that can disappear with the touch of a button.

As books become less central to our culture and the printed word becomes a relic, Read All Over poses this question: Is visual art a refuge for words, a place where they can go to attain some permanence? The works in Read All Over – all of which incorporate language or books or both – confront this question and respond in remarkable and resonant ways.

Read All Over
December 9, 2011–May 1, 2012

SCRAP METAL
11 Dublin St., Unit E
www.scrapmetalgallery.com

The Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present “Welcome to the Twenty-First Century”, an exhibition of new work by Douglas Coupland.

“I want to explore how it feels to be inside the 21st century brain as opposed to the 20th century brain,” says Coupland of his new show, one that examines how art and technology can decode the spirit of our age. Coupland’s fusion of paint with contemporary codes, vector graphics and text-based slogans challenge us to investigate how technology has advanced our lives while simultaneously leaving us empty. The show is at once poignant, irreverent and meditates on many levels on the human conditions and the natural world.”

Douglas Coupland: Welcome to the Twenty-First Century

26 January – 7 April, 2012
Opening 26 January, 6-8 pm
Artist in attendance

Daniel Faria Gallery
188 St Helens Avenue
Toronto ON M6H 4A1
+1 416 538-1880
www.danielfariagallery.com

Tuesday to Friday 11:00 am to 6:00 pm
Saturday 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

“My friend just opened the Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, which is where I got these works, my first real art purchases. They are by Douglas Coupland. I love the juxtaposition of video-game space invaders and Andy Warhol’s Stockholm Big Electric Chair series.”

Read the full article at theglobeandmail.com

From the Globe and Mail
Friday, Nov. 18, 2011

Ask Samara Walbohm how she’s feeling today and she’ll probably say what she said earlier this week: “Excited. Nervous. Scared.” In fact, she’s probably been feeling that way since May when she and her husband, Joe Shlesinger, signed a five-year lease on an L-shaped, 500-square-metre space down an alley near the eternally funky intersection of Bloor West and Lansdowne.

Positioned unprepossessingly between an auto-body shop and a marble-fixtures retailer, the former warehouse/wine-fermentation outlet with the “very Chelsea-20-years-ago kind of feel” is in the final, hectic throes of a white-walled conversion into Scrap Metal – the name Ms. Walbohm and Mr. Shlesinger are giving to what they hope – heck, believe – will become one of Toronto’s most important venues for visual arts and ancillary activities. Maybe even for Canada. It’s a non-commercial gallery scheduled to open to the public Dec. 9.

Ms. Walbohm, 40, and Mr. Shlesinger, 50, like art. Love it, in fact, to the point of obsessive compulsiveness, spending the last 13 or 14 years attending auctions and art fairs, touring galleries, befriending artists and dealers, avidly acquiring en route an impressive potpourri of artifacts, contemporary and otherwise, Canadian and international. They have paintings by Jack Bush, Marc-Aurèle Fortin and Jean-Paul Riopelle, videos by Mark Lewis, Ragnar Kjartansson and Bill Viola, photographs from Jeff Wall and Scott McFarland, installations by General Idea, Douglas Coupland and Micah Lexier, among many others.

Read the full article at theglobeandmail.com

Douglas Coupland Artist Sketch for Group Portrait 1957 from original 1957 photograph by Peter Croydon

Leave it to Douglas Coupland to change the façade of Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery with eccentric humour. His new public art installation there, Group Portrait 1957, offers 11 circular shapes that, according to Coupland, “contain concentric rings which are then placed above a painted white metal framework so that in symphony, all 11 forms become ‘transmitters.’”

What is transmitted is a clear-cut reference to the history of the RMG as a haven for the works of Toronto abstract art collective Painters Eleven; Coupland’s sculpture functions as a group portrait of them.

Read the full article at canadianart.ca