Alt-Arts: Danica Pinteric of Joys
A series of profiles, written by Ashley Culver, highlighting alternative art spaces in Toronto and the people who make them.
The entrance to Joys, at 903 Lansdowne Ave, Toronto.
Danica Pinteric outside Joys, 2025.
Photo: Garrett Lockhart.
En route to my first visit to Joys, an independent gallery run by Danica Pinteric, I continuously checked the map on my phone trying to determine when to venture off Lansdowne Avenue. It was the second weekend of May 2022, and Joys’ inaugural exhibition, Fuzzy Logic (with work by Nabil Azab, Boris Kurdi, Cadence Planthara, and Erin Skiffington), had opened the Saturday prior. I walked along the alley lined with garages and plants thrusting themselves into the world through the narrowest cracks in the concrete. I remember Pinteric sitting on a wooden chair in a strip of shade near the archway door. The arch of the laneway entry was a feature Pinteric added, and it distinguishes Joys from Audrey-Anne Morin and Marx Ruiz-Wilson’s TAP Art Space, the previous occupant of the garage.
Alyssa Alikapala, Tracings: in situ, 2023, installation view, Joys.
Courtesy of the artist and Joys. Photo: Holly M. Chang.
In the spring of 2021, Pinteric along with her partner, the artist Garrett Lockett, moved back to her hometown of Toronto. Like so many of us who made major life changes in those years, this relocation was prompted by the Covid pandemic. She had just graduated with a Master of Arts in Curating Arts & Culture from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. After a few months living in Nanaimo, BC, the couple drove to Toronto in a used car purchased on Salt Spring Island. Pinteric had doubts about returning but longed for the foundation of family and familiarity she knew the city could offer her. That same spring, Ruiz-Wilson, who was moving with their family back to Montreal, reached out to see if she wanted to take over the lease of the garage behind 903 Lansdowne Avenue. Pinteric and Ruiz-Wilson had met in Montreal in her college student days. “I hadn’t actually intended to start a space within the first year of moving to the city,” says Pinteric. Again, like so many of us, she had other plans of what life might look like prior to the pandemic. Nevertheless, she is “well into this alternate reality that opened up” and views Ruiz-Wilson’s call as a gift.
This winter, several weeks into the new year, we meet at a coffee shop in the Wallace Emerson neighborhood somewhere between Joys and her home. Her oversized, well-worn leather jacket is slightly damp from the walk here.
“I had new eyes on the city,” Pinteric says. “I hadn’t lived here since I left at 17. I felt every exhibition had a perfect thesis, and it felt very research-driven and a bit impenetrable to me. That’s not to say that’s still the case.” She uses the words “stark” and “cerebral” to describe the art scene she found when reacquainting herself with Toronto. Looking to counter this feeling, she aims to make room for joy along with criticality. Pinteric reflects, “My question when I first started [Joys] was: Why can’t things be fun and smart?”
Fuzzy Logic, 2022, installation view, Joys.
Courtesy of the artists and Joys.
Now, knowing the origin story, the name Joys makes sense, but there are more layers of thoughtfulness, of course. Pinteric enjoys the name on many levels, including as a pluralized single word that “springs out” and as an homage to her grandma, Joyce, who passed in 2019.
“It’s a choice to have something be plural,” says Pinteric, “It offers a more expanded or less singular idea. And that’s important for the space, which can feel a bit tangential in its programming and intentionally stretches across mediums and different formats.”
“I wanted a feeling of iteration and multiplicity in the visual from the beginning,” says Pinteric. This led her to invite artist Clara Talajic to create a logo design for Joys. Talajic, who has a background in printmaking, carved two stamps out of linoleum: one with lower-case lettering of j o y s and another with four horizontal, parallel wobbly lines. Originally, Pinteric stamped each exhibition text, playing on the ethos of the handmade print design; how-ever, recently, she has turned to a digital workflow. “Seeing the variations grow since it was first made has been pretty special,” Talajic says. It is indicative of Joys’ core values of plurality, iteration, play, and process.
Alyssa Alikpala in Coversation with Joys director Danica Pinteric, 2023.
Courtesy of Joys and AGAC. Photo: Ryley Remedios.
In the summer of 2023, Pinteric introduced Café Sprinkle, an event series of cakes and readings co-orga-nized with writer, baker, and artist Claire Geddes Bailey, also known as @spool__oven. The first gathering featured readings by Amy Ching-Yan Lam and EJ Kneifel along with confectionery art by Kees Cleveland, described as “spicy ginger meringue on gluten-free corn chiffon cake, with saffron custard & sweet and salty macerated peaches, decorated with mugwort, red bean & salted cherry leaf mochis, nori shreds, pepitas, candy pearls and flowers.” Guests sliced and devoured the dessert after taking in the readings. “I wanted writing that goes beyond comparisons to second-wave feminist art about the kitchen and takes into account the potential queer politics of certain dessert approaches—their somatics, maximalism, attunement to desire, utopian impulses, and communality,” says Bailey.
Later, Pinteric invited writer, curator, and radio host Veronika Ivanova to hold her annual screening of the video work Linkejimai/Wishes (1998) by Evaldas Jansas at Joys. The invitation came as a generous gift to uphold Ivanova’s ritual of honouring the passage of time; Ivanova, who had co-directed Bunker 2 from 2015–2018 and directed Crutch solo from 2018–2020, was then without a project space of her own. “She listened when I spoke of how much it meant to me to share this relational work with the world,” says Ivanova. “Until my collaboration with Joys, most public-facing screenings of this work didn’t engage the audience in quite the same way. Danica found a way to gather the audience ‘round, put warm bowls of soup in their hands, and have them view the work together, in relation to one another. That curatorial decision evoked the spirit of the work.” From 1 pm–4 pm on New Year's Day 2024, the 23-minute video work played on a loop at Joys. It is an early video piece from Lithuania. In the final dark hours of the year, Jansas asks pedestrians in Vilnius to share their wishes, and the respondents put words to their hopes, values, dreams, and fears.
Alyssa Alikapala, Tracings: in situ, 2023, installation view, Joys.
Courtesy of the artist and Joys. Photo: Holly M. Chang.
Time is an ingredient Pinteric intentionally integrates into the curation of Joys. This comes from previous expe-rience as well as learning from those she admires. From 2017–2019, Pinteric and Lockhart ran Calaboose, an independent gallery in Montreal. Although today Pinteric refers to Calaboose as a “love letter to that community,” she also recalls feeling burnt out from attempting to produce as many exhibitions as possible. Pinteric points to Shimmer, an exhibition space founded by Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma in Rotterdam, as inspiration. “They championed this model and showed me a way of working . . . with very, very long exhibitions with works floating in and out of them without discrete schedule,” says Pinteric, “more so evolving and giving a fluid life to the exhibition.”
The numerous and varied offerings Pinteric curates through Joys are impossible to summarize in full. Gallery exhibitions and programming play with format, draw us into her sense of time, and as she writes, “explore the politics of vulnerability.” In all these interdisciplinary activities, Pinteric views herself as the common denomi-nator. She aims to move with trust.
With our coffee cups empty, I ask Pinteric about this coming year. She tells me of her preparations for one prolonged exhibition extending from spring to fall: a du-rational format familiar to Joys that still holds possibility for more expansion and more experimentation. It will be about patience and this moment in time. As we walk out into the February weather, we continue to chat of the approaching days and seasons and plans and joys.
Café Sprinkle led by Joys and Toronto-based writer & artist baker Claire Geddes Bailey, 2023.
Courtesy of Joys. Photo: Garrett Lockhart.
by Ashley Culver
Ashley Culver (b. 1986) is an artist and writer based in Tkaronto/Toronto.
