Visual Artist John Monteith and His Hidden Histories

Written by Sophie Sobol

Grands Ensembles #1.1, 100% hand-dyed, hand-tufted, and hand-carved New Zealand wool 2019, 300cm x 200 cm created in collaboration with Urban Fabric, installed at MatzForm, Shanghai, edition of 10

Toronto-based visual artist John Monteith’s work is deeply referential. Influenced by architecture and the urban sphere, his diverse art practice peels back layers of identity, history, and collective memory.

“My work is often layered, and these layers refer to layers of experience and layers of history.”

This referential mindset extends to every facet of Monteith’s process. Recently in his practice, he’s started to foreground his relationship to electronic and techno music, which has been the soundtrack of his life in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s as an active part of the first generation of Toronto’s rave culture. Yet it’s not only the music that he relates to and loves, but also the long trajectory of related community-building and queer histories that he himself has been a part of internationally.

“Electronic music is the music of cities, of modernism. It's the music of brutalist and modernist architecture… Techno music is extremely spatial, and has a dimensionality containing multiple, multiple layers… And dancing is a spatial expression and form of non-verbal communication. When I make my work listening to this music, I’m sure it’s influenced the way I interpret and represent space visually through my drawings and my other artworks.”

Minskaya drawing series, colour pencil on drafting film, 2022 84.5cm x 61cm each

Monteith has a Masters Degree in Fine Art from Parsons the New School for Design in New York, and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University. During time spent learning to weave and working with textiles at NASCAD, Monteith has cultivated a deep material and conceptual understanding of a range different artistic mediums. His drawings, paintings, photographs, and textiles have been exhibited in New York, Zürich, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Toronto, and elsewhere. He currently works as a Sessional Lecturer as part of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.

Resonances, drawing series installation, Photofairs Shanghai 2019, coloured pencil on drafting film 61cm x 46cm each

After his time spent at NASCAD weaving Monteith turned back to drawing in preparation for a solo exhibition at Division Gallery in 2018, and later that year after completing an artist residency in Beijing he was commissioned to create an edition of rugs based on these drawings in collaboration with Urban Fabric, Shanghai. These large-scale, hand-dyed, hand-tufted, and hand-carved rugs can be found at Toronto’s own Client from Hell creative studio, and as far away as the Canadian Ambassador’s residence in Ankara, Turkey, and as a part of the art collection of Tricon Residential in San Francisco. 

Grands Ensembles custom rug, 100% hand-dyed, hand-tufted, and hand-carved New Zealand wool 2020, 800cm x 4500 cm created in collaboration with Urban Fabric, Installed in the Canadian Ambassador’s Residence, Ankara, Turkey

Although some believe him to be an emerging voice in the design world, Monteith considers himself strictly an artist. “I don't really see my rugs created for the Urban Fabric collection or commissioned for corporate and private collections as separate from work created for a museum or gallery exhibition. It's just another extension of my practice that allows me to think through making.” In Monteith’s typical holistic manner of thinking, his own understanding of his practice is always in connection to a vast web of references and influences.

“It all comes down to a basic idea, and how best to communicate this idea visually, and in what medium? I choose this medium accordingly, so the history of the material I’m working with is considered in relation to the ideas represented in my work and the references I intend to make. It’s quite a deliberate thing. With drawing I can talk about “provisonality” or ideas about erasure or reorientation, with textiles and rug making I can reference the history of twentieth century design, but also historical queer and feminist material and craft practices originating in the Bauhaus school and continuing through the last century and so forth.”

When asked if he would mind if his rugs were not displayed on a wall as an art object but on the ground as a functional object of design, he said: “I’m okay with that. It's staying true to the object and its materiality, for me it comes down to matters of intentionality.” 

Words of wisdom from John Monteith, an artist who loves to tap into the underflow, to track low frequencies and to harmonize with hushed vibrations. If you listen closely, you may just hear them yourself. 

Valleaceron #1-4, custom original rugs commissioned by Tricon Residential, San Francisco 100% hand-dyed, hand-tufted, and hand-carved New Zealand wool 2022, dimensions variable

This year John will open two exhibitions curated by Sarah Belden in Berlin during Berlin Gallery Weekend and Berlin Art Week, a collaborative exhibition with sound artist and composer Lou Shepard at Hunt Gallery in Toronto, an exhibition of his photographic work created in 2018 in residence at I: Project Space at the Dangxia Art Space in Beijing, and in 2024 at the EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne, Switzerland.

For more from John Monteith, please follow his Instagram account @jcm10_10 and visit his website: http://john-monteith.squarespace.com/.