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Appetite for Glory, Daniel St-Amant’s contribution to In the Box — an art show celebrating soccer — on now at Toronto’s The Local Gallery, doesn’t immediately fit in with the depictions of footballing heroes, sports equipment, and athletes in play that surround it. A Pac-Man style figure eating two circles, rendered in faux-concrete, the piece is a bit of thinker. But St-Amant says that the piece is actually totally on theme, particularly in a World Cup host city.
“Using images like Pac-Man for me represents consumption … eat, eat, eat, consume, consume, consume,” he says. “And I think FIFA overall is very representative of that. Buy, buy, buy, watch, watch, watch. It’s not a negative comment. It’s just sort of a comment on where we are as a society. And I think Pac-Man, he’s round like a ball. It just kind of hit me. and I was like, ‘Why not? Let’s give it a shot.’”
Appetite for Glory by Daniel St-Amant, part of In the Box at The Local Gallery in Toronto. (Courtesy The Local Gallery)
Art-about-sports has always been a key part of what The Local Gallery does. When the gallery first opened in Toronto in 2022 one of its early shows was “In the Paint,” an exhibition that celebrated the game of basketball. Its sister gallery in New York has also hosted several exhibitions celebrating both hoops in general and the Knicks specifically.
“When we opened, we were just coming out of the pandemic… and we were seeing online lots of sports [art], because we were watching [NBA] playoffs and we were seeing a crossover with what artists were doing that was just really interesting,” says Local Gallery co-founder Kaitlin Doherty. “So, we’re one of the first galleries in the world to celebrate it at this scale and the level. And then we just continued to do it because we saw the response to it.”
Maradona by Dave Murray, part of In the Box at The Local Gallery in Toronto. (Courtesy The Local Gallery)
With the World Cup in town, The Local Gallery team decided to investigate the world of sports once again. In the Box includes painting, sculpture, and mixed media pieces. Doherty says soccer, or football, depending on your preference, lends itself well to art because “the fan culture of football is just so deep, so passionate, and you can kind of see it through all the artists and what perspective they’ve brought in.”
Illustrator and painter Dave Murray had an up-close and personal experience of the World Cup. He designed Toronto’s official host city poster for the tournament, something he calls “a crazy honour. It still feels quite surreal to have my work chosen … there’s insane talent in the city.” He also has a piece in In the Box. Maradona is a depiction of Diego Maradona, Argentinian sporting icon of the 1980s, and a deeply divisive and controversial figure off the pitch, done in a style that Murray says “a lot of my inspirations in art: Cubism, Futurism, Deco. I love to kind of inject as much movement into uh, to every piece that I make.”
Don’t Look Back by Kyle Adams, part of In the Box at The Local Gallery in Toronto. (Courtesy The Local Gallery)
He chose Maradona because he’s “a larger than life character and absolute icon of the game” That iconic status, and Maradonna’s iconic look “gives me something very definitive to kind of apply style to.”
Combining art and sport isn’t new for Murray. As a teenager, he got a scholarship to a private school based on both his artistic prowess and hockey skill where he played goalie “I was always in-between worlds and in-between cultures … I feel very lucky to have the chance to take these two passions of mine, these two worlds, and help them meet in the middle and create more inclusivity for people who might feel excluded,” he says.
That desire, to bridge art and sport, making both feel inclusive, is baked into The Local Gallery’s DNA at this point, according to Doherty, and while they will do exhibits about other things, sport is something they play to keep coming back to. “Sport is a part of culture as much as art is,” she says. “So it’s always really nice to bring those pieces together.”
In the Box runs at The Local Gallery (621 College St.) in Toronto until July 5.