Toronto curators have never met a vitrine or museum display case they didn’t like. Their stress on archival research art and otherwise academically presented art, especially in public institutions, has left grassroots DIY art on the periphery. This sidelining, combined with skyrocketing rents, means that community-based or artist-organized initiatives, such as the performance space Double Double Land (2009–2018) or the numerous art collectives formed in the 1980s and 1990s, which largely defined Toronto’s visual art culture of the times, like the neo-expressionist painters’ collective Chromazone, are exceptions rather than community definers and builders. 

Therecordshow33rpm successfully channels the spirit of such indie ventures. Patrick DeCoste, a Nova Scotia born and raised Métis artist and educator now based in Toronto and Gidley Point, invited artists to take found record albums and alter their covers, ultimately curating the work of 34 artists. Rather than mounting the exhibition in a traditional gallery space, he held it at High Notes, a record store and café. Wisely, Decoste included artworks by the exhibitors and others in milk crates one could sift through, thus channeling secondhand discount bins. Art therefore merges with everyday urban life, drawing in both shoppers and art viewers who become accidental shoppers. 

The included artworks, all dated 2025 and most often titled after the chosen record albums, were splendidly eclectic, ranging from complete reconfigurations to satire and homage. Take, for instance, Andrew Harwood’s Never Can Say Goodbye, depicting disco sensation Gloria Gaynor as a medieval saint figure, and Mike Hansen’s eponymous Doctored, centring a clever word play between the altered record’s title and the exhibition’s artistic modus operandi. 

Altering album covers as art is not new. The most overt reference is Christian Marclay, particularly but not exclusively his series titled Body Mix (1991–1992), which comprised album covers stitched together across genres and eras to form bizarre, uncanny juxtapositions and Frankensteinian constructions of figures from various bodies. 

Much body alteration also occurs in DeCoste’s exhibition. For example, Drew Simpson replaced the heads of members of the forgotten (if ever remembered) Canadian musical comedy group The Brothers in Law with penises in Oh Oh Canada, while John Nobrega painted a realistic portrait of Elvis in Let’s Be Friends (Elvis), depicting him as Jesus Christ.

Now several decades after Marclay’s work, the appropriation of found images as art has been coopted by mainstream culture, a phenomenon originally buoyed by Photoshop and now taken exponentially farther with AI apps. Thus, Therecordshow33rpm artists work against a much different backdrop than Marclay, whose context didn’t include an online sphere of countless images that are, or can be, altered in countless ways. This current environment begs the question of what an artist must do to avoid disappearing into the void of the online image stream. 

Certainly, what Decoste presents here is far from the straight, often sexist content of album covers. Queer references abound, most overtly Ken Moffatt’s People, Assets, Environment, with its reproduction of an iconic Tom of Finland leather man figure. Using an album by Men of the Deeps, a Cape Breton choir billed as North America’s only coal miner’s chorus, Moffat suggests the incorporation of mining lingo into queer culture, such as the term “glory hole” (traditionally referring to an open pit mine entrance) or the Mineshaft, the iconic 1970s Manhattan BDSM club. 

Zachari Logan’s Straight Acting (Daisies), in which he placed that text over the cover of the Village People album Y.M.C.A., reminds one how so many homophobic suburbanites made exceptions for the ambiguous sexuality of the classic rock stars they admired. Logan’s work is especially relevant as The Village people themselves recently distanced their act from queer culture, claiming that some members are straight, in order to perform at Trump’s 2025 inauguration rally. Ron Loranger implicitly raises Mick Jagger’s bisexuality in Sticky Fingers. The iconic image of a pair of jeans with an unzipped fly already reads androgynously, but especially so when covered with (or queered by) Loranger’s multicoloured “blobettes,” the artist’s signature Francophone-referencing term for paint drops or blobs that appear in other pieces concerning queerness.

A topic begging exploration was the misogyny of many musicians and how that defines album covers. Adrienne Trent drew attention to that issue with the addition of menacing phallic snakes to the cover of the Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass album Whipped Cream, which was graced by a pin-up style photograph of a woman wearing only what was apropos for the title: whipped cream. 

However, few works explored the phenomenon of record collecting—a theme aptly raised by the exhibition, its context, and the milk crate inclusion. Romas Astrauskas’s work Fake White was the exception. In keeping with his recent black-and-white drawings, Astrauskas abandoned colour and image, painting over the regrettable Bonanza Christmas on the Ponderosa to resemble the notable collector’s item, The Beatles’ The White Album. A rendition rather than a replication, textured and spare, intentionally placed lines quell the minimalist piece from getting lost amid the colorful imagery of the other album cover works. It offers a quiet pause, focusing on absence rather than presence.

Astrauskas provides one answer to the question of how artists can stand out among internet overload: make work silencing visual noise. His approach further strengthens Decoste’s exhibition strategy of relocating internet strategies to a physical space, allowing viewers a sensorial experience rather than scrolling through images quickly abandoned in the junkyard of cyberspace.

Therecordshow33rpm, curated by Patrick DeCoste was on view at High Notes, in Toronto, from 7-21 June, 2025, and featured work by:

Romas Astrauskas, Jack Bride, Elaine Brodie, Jubal Brown, Mat Brown, Corpusse, Sean-William Dawson, Fastwurms, Clint Griffin, Sadko Hadzihasanovic, Anitra Hamilton, Mike Hansen, Andrew Harwood, Martha Henrickson, Thom Henrickson, Kineko Ivic, Shawn Johnston, Ron Loranger, David Liss, Zachari Logan, Kelly McCray, Ken Moffatt, Vesna Mostovac, John Nobrega, Jett Palframan, Lisa Pereira, Schem Rogerson Bader, Walter Segers, Drew Simpson, Jan Tillcock, Adrienne Trent, Kat Troy, and Jamie Whitey.