On Friday 17 June, the Toronto Reading Group will continue with the second session of their ongoing Reading Group, which is currently focused on If I Can’t Dance’s research field of Edition VI – Event and Duration (2015–2016). The Toronto Reading Group is organized by Jacob Korczynski and for this Edition is generously hosted by 8-11. 

For this second meeting, the reading group is being held in conjunction with Chroma Lives, a performative exploration of Toronto’s 1983 exhibition Chromaliving: New Designs for Living curated by Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston-Herterich, which they are undertaking as part of If I Can’t Dance’s current Performance in Residence research programme. 

Chromaliving, curated by the late artist Tim Jocelyn, Andy Fabo, and the figurative painting collective ChromaZone, was staged in a vacant retail space in Toronto’s Bloor Street Colonnade. Featuring 150 artists, the exhibition took the form of a hallucinogenic home décor show, with imaginative room environments parading influential artistic movements and commercial enterprises of the twentieth century. 

Chroma Lives has remobilized Chromaliving’s formula for theatricalizing domestic space by staging a living room workspace furnished by Toronto-based artists and designers in the sales centre of the new Yorkville Plaza at 21 Avenue Road. Throughout the month of June, Freedman and Huston-Herterich will be conducting oral histories with Chromaliving artists, spectators, and critics in the exhibition space towards a digital archive and a publication. 

For this session, the group will read Tim Jocelyn’s Chromaliving—Settling Accounts that appeared in the very first issue of C Magazine (Winter 1983-1984), which addresses firsthand the process behind the production of the exhibition. This will be read alongside curator Jon Davies’ Coming After – a text that accompanied his eponymous exhibition at The Power Plant in the winter of 2011-2012. In this text, subtitled queer time, arriving too late and the spectre of the recent past, Davies states:

While the concept of ‘queer’ has been the subject of heated critical debate for decades, Coming After was specifically compelled by what (Deborah) Gould calls