CC: Tell us why you started off the map Gallery. What was your incentive? What was the initiative?

Antonia Lancaster: Off the Map came out of a space requirement. I was actually doing my own work for about three years. I had a space at 80 Spadina and I did a show a month for under $50 and the process I met my objective and there was a space and so I thought it would be good for other artists. I had no intention of actually opening up a gallery.

But the opportunity presented itself and a lot of my work in doing galleries is in the placement of me in my placement of being in the art World, which is very, I’m actually not there. I’m I’m on the margins and I like it there. I don’t get myself to involved. I don’t look too closely. If I look too closely. I figured I’d get disillusioned but I don’t want to look away totally because then you’re totally disconnected but it has allowed me to do a lot of things without the pressures of the art world or the expectations of the art world. I can just open the doors and start something and I think that’s always been how I’ve gone about things.

To do my own shows I just opened up the door and started to do these shows and it was the same with the Off The Map Gallery. Once my shows stopped. I just opened the doors to other other artists. There was nothing initially official about it. It was just there was a space and I thought other artists would benefit from it.

Now there was an ideology at the beginning which was to give people shows or artist shows that didn’t normally get shows in Toronto because it’s very difficult. If you don’t have connections here. So my idea was people that didn’t normally get shows. If you got a lot of shows in Toronto that wasn’t really what interested me. It was the artist that didn’t that shows. So a lot of people that came through were from Europe or outside of Toronto.

CC: Talk about about the 80s Spadina space to clarify you were having shows once a month or you were giving other artists shows.

Antonia Lancaster: Well in 2000 we got the space at 80 Spadina and it was to open up an office and the office was relatively large. And so I split the space into two – one part was a studio.and the other part was a gallery – but for myself. So from 2000 to 2003 I had shows every month or almost every month except holidays and whatever just to get myself working. It’s hard enough to work in a vacuum. But this is the way that I had to put on a half-decent show. I could open up the doors people would come through and most people didn’t even know what they just accepted it as a gallery. They didn’t know that I was the only artist showing for three years and my goal was 22 shows for some reason and I achieved that objective. I was exhausted and I wasn’t broke because the shows only cost me $50 a month.

It was a lot of fun. It was a challenge As it turns out looking back. They acting actually ended up being sketches of pieces that I would now go on and elaborate on and one example would be the hairpiece I did. A hairpiece for one of the monthly shows and then later I was asked to do a work for gallery and I just worked up one of the pieces and it really worked. Well, so but they were they were “show good” that’s what I would call it.

CC: Describe the work was an installation.

Antonia Lancaster: I consider myself an object maker. So they were mostly objects. I do paint as well. So there was two painting shows but as an example, I did something called a rape kit and set them up. It was like a commercial space. So I had all these rape kits set up as though the gallery space was a warehouse space and people were just stacking the work to be exported or distributed. So when people would come in they wouldn’t even relate to the spaces being a gallery. They thought it was just stacked full of some kind of warehouse goods and I liked that. I liked that feel. And so a lot of the work looked like that where people wouldn’t actually understand that it was a gallery they came in and they sort of look around and then walk out, but they were actually looking at art.

A lot of the idea of taking art out of a white cube, which I consider the pedestal has become the white Cube where people feel comfortable looking at art because it’s in a white cube and they understand that it’s art and therefore react to the work that way. If it’s not in white cube and they become quite anxious and they’re not quite sure what it is how they’re supposed to respond is the work art or isn’t it? The question becomes even bigger.

CC: So given that 80 Spadina is a pretty pricey area. How do you make a show for, did you say $50 a month? How does that come about?

Antonia Lancaster: When I said that one part of the gallery it was the administration section for the gallery, but I also work as a graphic designer. So that was how the space was afforded. 

CC: So it was subsidized by your work as a graphic designer. The space had a dual-purpose.

Antonia Lancaster: Yeah, and yeah, that’s the other criteria is not to make work to be sold. Like that. that was one of the criteria that I always put on the work that it’s not being made to be sold because you’re presenting work in a kind of challenging unconventional way. So people are wondering in not knowing really what they’re looking at. 

CC: Can you give us a sort of spectrum of reactions from? Confusion to trying to provoke people. How did they receive it?

Antonia Lancaster: There was a fair amount of just not dealing with it. They were quite ready to accept that it wasn’t a gallery space that somehow the gallery that was there was had shut down or that the space is being used for something else for the time being but there were actually very few people who I was surprised would make an effort to go and actually see what was there and to explore what was there. A lot of the art community who I would expect had been trained to look and understand that things like this happen didn’t see it either. They’re more trained. I think outside to see installations outside in situ work if you came across it, but to come across in a gallery space something that doesn’t look like it’s art. I think that might have been something new.

CC: I guess it was an exercise in testing or challenging people on how they perceive art. What conditions they require, you know, when you talk about the white cube and there’s all these things that put people at ease because they know they’re looking at art.

Antonia Lancaster: There was no intent initially. I was just exploring myself. By having done this particular practice of not giving me that much time to think something through and produce and then talking to the general public about my own work without them knowing that it was mine. It led me to a few conclusions about how people look at Art. I think things progressed from there and I wanted to explore that further. In some cases I could do it in other instances I couldn’t you know, that’s for maybe later on or something. But a lot a lot did come through people talking to me about different things. A lot of it very stereotypical thinking. Things about education. Things people felt really safe about talking about art. You kind of knew that every art school has talks about that every art community talks that way. There’s a fair amount of conservatism in the art circles. Where they artists themselves feel safe talking that way and exploring art.

CC: That way people were looking for reference points, something that they could say “Oh, this is like or this is in the tradition”. You know it’s situated in a kind of way I can see the influences.

Antonia Lancaster: Yeah. Yeah, which is very annoying. I did a large paper bag where I took a lot of cans and I put my own labels on the cans and somebody just came in and said, oh, it’s Andy Warhol, without looking or exploring and it really had nothing to do with that. It was just because it was Soup cans and you got a sense that they had just gone to a class or a lecture and they felt really good about themselves because they could position the work. But in fact, I mean it was very to me, it exposed their own lack of actually investigating and looking.

CC: We were talking about this movie Exit Through the Gift Shop. The artist became wildly popular because he was making art that look like art. As long as people know and they didn’t question that it was derivative or that it was, you know…

Antonia Lancaster: Well, I think people are feel very comfortable when it is derivative. And when it’s not then they do I think that’s why a large large institutions show very derivative of art to allow their customers who aren’t maybe totally into art or all that culture, but it allows them to feel culture because they’ve heard the name before. So, you know, putting up a Jackson Pollock everybody’s heard of him so they feel cultured. You put up somebody that’s not quite so well known, people haven’t heard of them before – they feel uncultured. So they you know they feel uncomfortable.

CC: Can you talk about how that transition from first space at 80 Spadina Ave.to the Off the Map gallery on Landsdowne Avenue?

Antonia Lancaster: This comes out of my own search for my own needs. My partner and I were looking for a space that I could work in like a large studio space that was actually separated from living space just because of toxics and whatever and then I didn’t have to worry about that. We looked around quite a lot for a separated space living and work and we finally found this place 712 Lansdowne Avenue just above Wallace Ave. and it was perfect. I mean we drove by and it was really rundown, total disrepair. The driveway was being used as a dog run and a like a dog pound. Inside of the garage. there’d been a fire and there had been all this fire retardant and the fire got into the retardant and there was just it was a chemical pool. It was just totally toxic so we actually got the space and it wasn’t that expensive but there was no thought of putting a gallery in there or even me working in there for quite a while. So but at a certain point we did clear the garage. It was becoming very clear as I was saying that the space at 80 Spadina was a good travel space for people coming through but it wasn’t a challenge for me. I mean, I was just donating one more space and artists were coming in and putting up work and it became increasingly clear that the garage would actually make an interesting space. The struggle became between people recommending and offering to help “white cube” the garage and me realizing that this is probably, ironically, the very type of space as a sculptor and object maker I would like to be able to work in or show in and I’ve never been able to. So I think the only thing that got fixed in the garage was that we put a roof on it. And that was fun. We had a large garage sale for all the people that kind of that followed Off the Map. We all got together and had a garage sale in the community and everything and we got the roof covered in – but that was it. I really thought it might be a really good idea to have artists deal with a leaky roof as as much as with the cold and the space non-being non-insulated and all of that type of thing.

CC: So give people an idea of the space.

Antonia Lancaster: It used to be an old metal shop and it’s just cinder blocks and different parts of the walls have collapsed and people had patched them. It’s got old factory windows and we raised the ceiling. So it’s got a 14, I guess 13 foot/14 foot ceiling, old doorways,cement floor painted like an old sort of workshop with green along the along the bottom spacing and then just gray on the top but everything was peeling. There’s old electrical boxes in there one outlet no heat. It actually became quite exciting to figure that artists really be given that challenge where it be open all year round, but they would have to work in the cold and they would have to work in the humidity of the summer and there’s one electrical outlet – it was Istvan Kantor that really put that to the test by hanging 40 lights off it as he hung from the ceilings. So but it was fine.

They (artists) had to give me the space back exactly the same way that I gave it to them. And so many artists really wanted to paint the space into a white cube. They swore that they would put it back. Some people thought they were doing me a favor by painting it white, you know, you won’t have to pay for the white paint and you know, won’t have to do anything to it. I’m saying no no, that’s not the point. You know, the point is the space has to come back to me exactly as I gave it to you so that everybody else gets that same environment to work with.

CC: You mentioned you were looking specifically for you know artists who weren’t so well-known maybe European artists. Position yourself a bit more and talk about the art world now and where you sit in it.

Antonia Lancaster: Well my ideology for the space actually changed slightly when I went into the garage space because it became very installation based. What I tended to do was to ask people to, it wasn’t so much curating, I was asking people who they thought would actually enjoy going into the space and dealing with the space. And so it did come down not so much to people that were from outside, but it was more dealing with people that could and wanted to deal with the space.

A good example of somebody who wanted to go into the space and then me talking to them about the space because I’m part of the context to that space if I mean you do have a space. It has an environment and a language, but then I also go along with that space and I also set my context, so it’s not just the space It’s also me. So one of the artists Unuan Suri came to me and she just done a residency (I think it was in Texas) and she wanted to show work and the work was exactly the type of work that I didn’t want to show. It was just work she’d already done and she was wanting to hang out and just display it and I looked at the work and I realized that she was working with lines. And so I made the suggestion well why not use what you’re doing? You don’t have to change what you’re doing or what you’re thinking or your philosophy, but why not just try and translate that into something physical onto the gallery which you know, she thought about it and she did a fantastic piece.

It was using lines and it was putting it, she used electrical different colored electrical tapes and put them up around all around the gallery over the windows over the different obstructions along the walls, and she transformed the space. And I use this as an example because I don’t want to change an artist philosophy or ideology or how they work. But it is it just translating it into something slightly different and allowing them into another dimension or way of looking at their own work and allowing them to express it a little differently.

So I found that that worked over and over and over again with all the artists. They would come with a preconceived idea of how they were going to deal with the space. And then there was an interaction with them and a description of what it was that I saw in terms of what the space was about. Not what they should do, but just what the space was about and there tended to be a tug of war because people aren’t used to dealing with a space like that. They’re not used to dealing with what it was and my vision was for the space, again it’s not making them or telling them what to do or altering what they did in terms of their philosophy, but it was giving them another outlet or dimension to their own work.

Another example is Libby Hague. She’s essentially she’s a printmaker and she wanted to come in and do a work that dealt with flat paper and she was going to do an avalanche where she was setting up the structure and then she was going to put flat paper over everything but her piece was in the midsummer and there’s it’s very very moist and her paper just sagged. It wouldn’t hold the structure and she had to deal with the problem and what she came up with absolutely stunning. I mean, here’s a print maker who’s used to dealing with flat paper and looking at paper that way and she had to bunch the paper. She actually had to scrunch it up, which I would think would be sacrilegious but it was a absolutely stunning piece that came out of that like her problem solving for that.

Another was Ed Pien, like he his work was in midwinter and we all thought that water froze in Winter. It turns out not in the garage. So we had to have you know, we had water and all these bags and they weren’t freezing and so we ended up having this sort of marathon where we had to put the the bags out in the out in the open where they frozen them bring them back into the garage where they remained frozen as a group, but try and get them to freeze actually in place. It wasn’t happening.

Paul Culliard did a really nice piece too. He he did a performance piece for a month where the gallery was open 24 hours. His opening was twelve o’clock at night and he did an eight-hour performance from 12 till 8:00 the next day. For the first two weeks he did his performance from 8:00 till 4 o’clock during the day and then the last two weeks he did from 4 o’clock till 12:00 midnight. So like I had nothing to do with that like after 10 o’clock. I’m gone, like I’m in bed. Like all of this activity is going on. I’m asleep and you know, everything was fine. It was great, but all people were coming in like two three four o’clock in the morning, you know, they’re all huddled around blankets and they were watching Paul kind of doing some really kind of really neat things like he was doing a lot of Zen type movements and things like that, and I don’t know why he didn’t freeze, but he didn’t.

CC: What did the neighbours think of all this?

Antonia Lancaster: The neighbors were very good about it. They were very supportive by not making a problem. They didn’t come to the gallery although and they were invited they didn’t participate, there were one or two people that did but on the whole we very quiet. There was only the openings we didn’t take up parking spaces. We only had one time when there was a problem. One of the artists wandered off into a neighbor’s back space and they were kind of worried about their car. So that was the only time I got a complaint. They were really good about it. But also the artists were really good because that was another part. Because of the look of the garage a lot of artists thought it was just a free and open space where you could yell and scream and do whatever – most of them didn’t want to do that but one or two of them thought that they thought would be part of what they would do and I was saying well, this is actually it’s a residential neighborhood. The garage is very rough the look of it is but the neighbors it’s actually, you know, just very family-oriented and all of that. We did have to crack houses like two houses to the right and two houses to the left, but they weren’t saying anything, they were no problem or anything.

CC: What was missing in the art scene to make you want to start the gallery?

Antonia Lancaster: Well, I guess that’s where I’m different because Off the Map didn’t come into existence to compensate or to fill a void, but I think it is more or less when the opportunity came up it was more to give people that tended to not have a chance to show a chance to show and that presumably is a personal thing, you know because I travel a fair bit and as an artist, you can’t really expect to walk into a community and get a show you know, it’s a much harder thing than that. 

Well, I think what I’d like to touch on is probably more philosophical. I find that a lot of galleries – and this is probably the answer to what you’re asking – I find that a lot of galleries they want to show experimental art. They want to do a lot of things. But because things cost so much money and they get funding once you start to do that. I think things start to change you can’t you start to not be able to do what you want. You have to pay the rent you have to go and follow what the funders want. So the galleries tend to change from being “we want to be experimental to being quite conformist because they either have to sell or they have to satisfy or make their funders feel comfortable.

So I didn’t want to have that happen. So the gallery ran where there was no money passing. I made no money and the artist made no money. There was no money exchanged whatsoever anything that’s sold was between whoever wanted to buy it and the artist so I virtually donated time and space and the and the artist donated their time and effort.

Why the gallery stopped was because I became tired. There comes a point when what I had gotten from it was, you know, I had done my experiment and the gallery was growing beyond me if I wanted it wanted to grow and I couldn’t go there with it. I wasn’t willing to do that to do that. I think the reason is I realized that there would be money and funding involved and I would be co-opted I wouldn’t be able to do the vision that I wanted.

But the biennale idea came out of totally out of Off the Map in its ideology and I that’s how I grew I wanted a different experience from the gallery and I could see that the idea and the ideology of the gallery could be put onto a biennale and I knew that Toronto could do a biennale with its hands tied behind his back. There’s all the experience, all the artists, everything here and they just weren’t doing it.

So I formed a group, there were 11 of us and initially the biennale was set up exactly like the Off the Map where artists would find a space and they would have to deal with that space much the way they did with Off the Map, but then it just became somewhere where there there there had to be the funding coming into it and all of that type of thing. But we forged on. But then Toronto and I guess different institutions and everything got together and Toronto is sort of in its own way promising that there will be a biennale somewhere down the line. So I think the group just decided that we had done our our part in stimulating that. But it was not a community effort. The biennale directly came directly out of Off the Map. It wasn’t a community effort. That was where I was going with that. That would have been that next step.

CC: Did you feel that any of the previous initiatives historically in Toronto around collectives/collective galleries (in some senses that kind of do-it-yourself thing) influenced what you did with Off the Map?

Antonia Lancaster: Nothing and that that’s a personal thing because as I started off with I my relationship with the art world is very fringe, in that I seem to have cut out an area for myself where I’m not too close and I’m not too far away. Therefore. I didn’t base my idea on anything that went before.

I can quite quite safely say that it had nothing to do with anything that had gone before and in fact in many ways. My artwork is like that too. I mean, I just kind of do it and I find that it comes out of sort of a set of ideas, but I at the same time, I don’t know, I might be reproducing what somebody else has already done years ago or somebody’s already doing it or something, you know, so I just I just never know. It’s not like I do research into it or anything. So somebody could have been doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time and I wouldn’t have known.

CC: It is interesting though because you have you have a fringe relationship to the art world in terms of the gallery but Ed Pien and Libby Hague, these are people who are fairly well-known so it’s it’s kind of duality, you know, you’re doing it in with a high degree of intention. You want to exert a fair amount of control over how the gallery is run and what it does and yet it’s not, you know, the people who show there really aren’t that Fringe necessary or unknown.

Antonia Lancaster: Yeah, and that’s what is the difference between the garage gallery and the 80 Spadina space. If I said the name Robert Cannon-ash – would you know who I was speaking about? even Samina Mussoorie now? She’s starting to makea namefor heself. Robert is from Albania. Samina is from Karachi Pakistan. Lin Quant Aang. That’s not his name is but he’s a professor from a famous American University, but he’s essentially Chinese.

These are people who if I said their names you wouldn’t know. The garage was different because there had to be sort of, I don’t want to use the word more of a confidence, but being able to deal with a very large space you kind of had to know more about what Toronto was about and where the workshops were and and connections to kind of have it done. Libby had us a little bit of help Ed had a little bit of help. It just it became different and you’re right initially it started off and that’s why I’m saying initially it started off with the idea of giving the space to people that don’t normally get to show. The garage space was became more about the work itself as opposed to the origin of the artist. You have to remember to I had people signed waivers, you know, if anything happens to you here, that’s your problem. You know, if there was no insurance on the work and it was artists that were willing to do that and it did come down to a certain type of artist who was more used to the situation and circumstance. It’s a hard thing to answer.

One of the things that I didn’t want to do was to totally use myself as a filter and make all the choices. So I would ask other people to do or choose so they would curate somebody. I mean I didn’t go out and ask. Well, actually I did ask a Libby. Well, that was one of the things about the gallery if you showed there then it was your responsibility to bring somebody inThat’s how that happened.

CC: What I’m observing is that the space itself had a certain set of requirements artists, as you mentioned needed to have some infrastructure to draw upon and is a little bit more experienced and can be trusted because it’s that your personal space and then you need to see that it’s aesthetically successful, you don’t want to be blindsided by something that you don’t know about… you know the artist of what they’re going to do.

Antonia Lancaster: But there is all of that. Yeah. And as I say the the next level up would have been another whole level up of artists, which I wasn’t sure, I didn’t feel comfortable exploring that. It would have been artists that would have made a lot more demands. I thought on me, I don’t know because I didn’t I didn’t explore it, but I understood that there probably be a lot more demand on me and a lot more expectation put on me by the level of artist that was starting to become interested in showing. I also didn’t want to as I say get co-opted, I may not have been as I say, I just didn’t explore that. It’s just like anything to me the project had come to its full realization from what it was giving me and I really enjoyed what was going on. I thought most of the work was really strong. It really pulled a lot out of the artists which if that kind of space could be given to artists I think it would be a very powerful thing. As it is there’s not that type of space here in Toronto and I think it would really be a benefit to artists maybe on a more official level or if artist could get together and and get a space like that.

CC: It’s interesting that you were giving a space to artists, offering them space when space is becoming harder to get for these kind of things in Toronto. Can you talk a bit about the idea of the dilemma of real estate in Toronto and secondly did the art establishment paying attention to what you were doing?

Antonia Lancaster: Okay, in terms of real estate, I would be very difficult. It’s just disappearing very fast. On the other hand I’m pretty sure they’re an awful lot of people that could donate space. I mean there are warehouses and space is sitting around that I’m pretty sure could be donated one way or the other. So yes on if you have to go out and pay for the space and that type of thing. It’s rapidly disappearing, but I think there are a lot of people that own spaces like that. Well, it’s not just a space you it’s donating the insurance on top because that’s always a problem too. Well, one of the interesting things about moving to the garage out of 80 Spadina, It was forcing an audience to come out and it’s quite difficult to get. Lansdowne, it didn’t make it easy. And so I really thought that there would be a problem and this actually comes back to who shows because if you’re well-known the show’s got well attended if you weren’t that well known the show’s weren’t that well attendant, but really I think the only person that didn’t come through the space, even the National Gallery the Textile Museum, a lot of the curators, everybody came through the space. I think the only person that didn’t was David Liss (MOCCA). He was the only person that didn’t come through. Gary Michael Dault (Globre & Mail) wrote on various shows. So I felt supported. But it’s not like anybody talk to me or ask me what I was doing. One of the curators from the National Gallery came through, Jonathan’s Shaughnessy, and he was talking to to Libby about her show and was interested in Off the Map and asked me a few questions.

But there was no in-depth interest. No, it wasn’t like “I like your idea or any interest in me and particular. Again, and this is how I structured it so I have to take responsibility for it. I felt that Off the Map Gallery had a profile and a personality and whatever but I didn’t like I nobody actually knew who I was. The gallery was being run but nobody really had met me or really understood that I was part of it or they may have seen me but they didn’t put like the gallery and myself together. So I do have to take a certain amount of responsibility for that. It’s not like I was using the gallery to further my own name or anything. A lot of people wondered why I didn’t name the gallery Antonia Lancaster Gallery. I chose not to do that for the reason that it was not for that purpose and I felt it made it stronger and the ideology stronger not to do that. I’m not a gallerist and I’m not a curator and Off the Map gallery, the name Of theMap was also chosen for that purpose where everybody’s essentially trying to get on the map, you know, and I just felt it was a much more powerful name because it says, you know you are doing work that’s not part of what’s going on. That it’s not a struggle to be the same or conforming and that we are doing something different. That there is no context really for it. That was what I was hoping for and and that was why the name was chosen.

CC: Why don’t you think the established institutions pay more attention to this groundswell of artist initiatives, putting on shows, initiating curatorial spaces etc…etc…Any thoughts about that?

Antonia Lancaster: Well, I think institutions that have been sort of the most co-opted at all sort of art endeavors because their money and funding comes from particular areas and to be a large institution and and to expect large amounts of funding and donations you have to you have to play it safe and the work has to be safe and you have to make your constituencies feel safe and so it just makes them rather insensitive to the more active experimental or fringe elements because that’s the in secure area. That’s where artists are pushing the boundaries and there’s nothing more unsafe than pushng boundaries. So your institutions can can’t go there. Their their constituents won’t let them go there.

But for support, I think there could be more support. They may feel that. that there is kind of a, if they support more experimental work or galleries that it may somehow detract from their own programming and there’s probably only a certain amount of energy that can go into and it by putting your energy and focus to one side you you become blind to what else is going off. You just start to cut it off.

But to me, I think the greatest benefit and I think we were talking about this, the greatest benefit to institutions as they exist for artists to struggle against. They become the bulwark of what you need to go beyond and if you’re doing what institutions would like you to do then somehow you’re not doing your job. So to me as an artist functioning out there you can almost take the institutions as a guideline of what you should be going beyond. Again, if you’re trying to get into an institution it bureaucratizes you, because again, it’s just like funding I mean, there’s a set of criteria you have to do to get in and shown and I think that in itself makes you very conservative and really affect your work.

Yeah, I think there’s there is strength in a lot of art, in a lot of artists. It’s just it’s so hard to be an individual as an artist, like because the assumption is that because you’re an artist you are an individual or a unique individual and I think it’s a hard lesson to learn that that’s not true. Like you you have to still work just because you’re being an artist is not making you necessarily unique.