By Rhonda Riche

Empire building is not something you hear about in Canadian art. Ever. Until Friday night.
Painter, singer/songwriter and photographer, Thrush Holmes was born in September, 1979. Holmes went to OCAD for two weeks and claims that, “I learned all I needed to know in that time.” Flash forward five years and he’s opening a new gallery/installation space at 1093 Queen St W called Thrush Holmes Empire.
“There is a major ironic wink attached to the term Empire,” says Gallery Director Andrew Harwood (formerly of Zsa Zsa and the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International). Yet, “the Empire thing is, in part, serious. Especially about wanting to create an art world within a gallery and studio space not unlike Warhol’s Factory or Kostabi World.”
Holmes has exhibited in galleries across the world. His resin-coated manipulations of found photographs have been collected by the likes of Elton John and Halle Berry. And one of his personal missions is to sell 75,000 paintings to IKEA. Yet so far, media attention in Toronto has been elusive—local writers seem to feel that Holmes’ persona involves too much hype, or that his equal interests in music, books, and art are dilletante-ish. “There is a part of the Canadian art world psyche that is not about bragging or showing off in terms of an artist’s success in a variety of areas.”
Is it strange to open a gallery in a city that likes its artists understated and financially dependent on grants? Holmes doesn’t care. According to Harwood, the gallery’s message is “Art is cool ‘n’ stuff!” This sentiment does not carry the usual Toronto-brand, self-conscious whimsy. It’s been scanned for sarcasm and it is clean.
Maybe Thrush Holmes Empire is part of a larger movement of emerging artists who operate outside of Post Modernism. Maybe it’s part of a trend which New Yorker visual arts critic Peter Schjeldahl describes as “Kids who haven’t had time to forget why they became artists: for joy, revenge, and camaraderie.”
Or maybe we should stop being so introspective and head on down to Queen and Ossington between 6pm and 10pm on Friday the 26th for the Empire’s Inaugural Exhibition, “We Are Images.”
Image, Thrush Holmes, “Fuck Me Empire”. Mixed media on panel, 96X60”, 2007.