JOHN MONTEITH
John Monteith is an internationally exhibiting artist and Senior Sessional Lecturer in the Visual Studies department of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. His work is informed by the intersection of queer methodologies, abstraction, urban spatial politics, and material histories of twentieth-century art and craft practices. Monteith draws upon Andreas Huyssen’s notion of the “urban palimpsest”– the idea that cities are layered site of memory, history, and imagination. He responds to architectural space with reference to Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, a structure spanning the globe with an interior that was constantly transforming according to the whims of its inhabitants, imagined through collaboration, collectivity, and experimentation. The abstraction Monteith pursues is highly referential rather than strictly formalist. The drawings that form the foundation of his practice resist representation while recasting and layering skyscrapers and skylines, modernist towers and brutalist buildings, paths, parkways, highways, and roadways into overlapping, repeating, and reformulated compositions.
Monteith has exhibited at the Tate Modern, London, the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, X Initiative, New York, the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei, the DUMBO Art Center, New York, 7th Beijing Biennale, Beijing, and Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City.Monteith has held artist residencies at CAT Cologne, Germany (2011), Kunsthalle Roveredo, Switzerland (2014), I Project Space, Beijing (2018) along with the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai in 2024.
