MOCA’s new space struggles for a sense of self GlobeArts
Co-directors November Paynter and Rachel Hilton sit on Andrea Angelidakis's 'DEMOS - A Reconstruction', 2018, at the MOCA in Toronto on Feb. 21, 2019.Since it opened last fall in a repurposed aluminum factory in Toronto’s gritty Junction neighbourhood, the Museum of Contemporary Art has welcomed visitors with a crowd-pleasing installation of foam cuboids scattered around its lobby.
It began life as a small civic gallery, the Art Gallery of North York, housed in the lobby of the white-elephant performing arts centre at Yonge and Sheppard. After that suburb amalgamated with the City of Toronto, the gallery reincarnated itself as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art but handed its collection of 400 works, mainly paintings by prominent Canadian artists of the postwar generation, back to the city.
What they oversee is an evolving question: MOCA is on a quest to figure out what a museum is and what it should do. Paynter says the institution, which currently has no permanent collection and no acquisition budget, should be more experimental and multidisciplinary than its closest peer, the Power Plant gallery at Harbourfront, which is also dedicated to mounting temporary shows of new international and Canadian art.
This means that MOCA is an institution that it is literally querying the utility of art.
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