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In order to exhibit their art and be involved in art discourse, several Toronto artists established YYZ Artists’ Outlet as an artist-run centre in 1979. Artist and founding member Elizabeth MacKenzie noted in her interview that YYZ was interested in showing photo-based, conceptually-founded, and technologically-mediated works dealing with issues of representation and informed by European critical theory, which started to appear in English translation at the time, while not rejecting traditional media. Similarly, artist and YYZ board member Andy Patton notes that this commitment to showing works across all media was unusual at the time. It demonstrated a democracy of form and a focus on content.
Hence, the period of 1980s has been described as a return to content. YYZ Artists’ Outlet was at the forefront of this shift by organizing exhibitions like Joanne Tod’s Replications (Dark-Haired Girls) (1981), David Clarkson’s The Fragments of an Incomplete Reconaissance (1980), and Janice Gurney’s Reparations (1984). YYZ also organized major shows that were shown in several galleries and artist-run centres such as Monumenta (1982), The New City of Sculpture (1984), and The Interpretation of Architecture (1986). All through the 80s, YYZ supported controversial exhibits like Paul Wong’s Confused: Sexual Views (1984), which shattered any notion that YYZ was a service organization and reaffirmed it as an alternative exhibition space.
During the 1980s, YYZ Artists’ Outlet also moved into book publishing. From printing exhibition catalogues and brochures for shows like Alternate Photography (1983), Subjects in Pictures (1984), and The Interpretation of Architecture (1986), YYZ published Philip Monk’s Struggles with the Image (1988) as the first YYZBOOKS publication in its Critical Works series; a series that would publish many subsequent books on contemporary art and criticism.
The exhibit Representations: YYZ in the 80s is a chronological record of shows that took place at YYZ from 1979 to 1989 and dealt with issues of representation. It compiles photographs of exhibits taken from YYZ’s archives, art writing, and art criticism, as well as recent interviews with major figures in the Toronto art community of the 80s to give a more complete history of YYZ and Toronto’s art world at that time. As art critic/curator Philip Monk remarked in his interview for the exhibit, artist-run centres are places where Canadian art history is played out. In this sense, Repr
