Moving into a new house or apartment is typically welcomed like a new beginning: inviting the opportunity to restart a domestic life, new homes can temporarily obscure unhappy pasts and cushion against uncertain futures. Yet as the architectures pictured by Kristie MacDonald and Christina Battle at Gallery 44 indicate, a well-organized home can never fully protect us from the threats of the outside world, be they forces of nature or politics (or oftentimes both). Shown at the Toronto gallery this past January, MacDonald’s Mechanisms for Correcting the Past, 2013, and Battle’s dearfield, colorado, 2012, each challenge the function of the photograph as a straightforward archival document, instead proposing alternatives for how the medium can engage with histories obscured from view.
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Mystery pervades Marisa Portolese’s photographs. They tap into the depths of our inner self. Childhood and its scars lay at the heart of these works. They resonate with us by giving voice to the unutterable. A prolific artist since the 1990s, Portolese focuses on the personal realm. With disturbing realism she portrays the vulnerability of her subjects who are often members of her family. For all intents and purposes, they symbolize that search for identity that defines a person. Indeed, these family members seem to be proxies for an artistic undertaking seeking to engage the full complexity of the individual and their emotional underpinnings.
By exposing the assembly of one’s own back story, the reorganized, the blended, Thauvette reminds us of the condition of history itself. Her willingness to engage with historical subjects and drop in a mixed bag of contemporary reference is both modern and vintage all at once—much like the medium in which she works.
![Jackson 2bears, Mythologies of an [Un]dead Indian, 2013, video still. Reproduction courtesy the artist and the Ryerson Image Centre.](https://i0.wp.com/blackflash.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/bf_31_1_2bears.jpg?fit=997%2C376&ssl=1)
The critical approach in recent years to categorize contemporary Indigenous art and artists is of principle concern here; there is a danger of conflating aesthetic, cultural, and individual autonomy under the banner of partisanship. It seems to me, at least, that there is an underlying danger that when too many lines are drawn in the sand, there becomes no more room left to manoeuvre.
Mid-way through the Contact Photography Festival, the exhibition “Through the Body: Lens-Based works by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists” opened at the University of Toronto Art Centre. Though Chinese contemporary art has had impact on the international art world since the 1980s, the face of Chinese art has been dominated by male artists. Responding to this, curators Matthew Brower, Fu Xiaodong, and Yan Zhou decided contribute to Contact’s exploration of identity by bringing together the photography of eleven contemporary Chinese female artists and collectives whose work explores the social and political circumstances that surround them.
As a nod to the 40th year since hip hop was founded in New York’s south Bronx, the Gladstone Hotel is showing a selection of iconic photographic portraits of hip hop artists and emcees for the Contact Photography Festival. This exhibition does not only document the cultural phenomenon through these individuals, but also explores the communication of persona through photography, and the collaboration between photographer and artist to convey the subject’s identity, in particular the relationship between the individual’s past roots and present artistry.
Two years after the International Olympic Committee decided that Sochi would host the 2014 Winter Olympics, photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist Arnold van Bruggen decided to undertake an ambitious project of “slow journalism,” filming, photographing, and capturing oral histories in Sochi over four years.
Though the artists included in this exhibition look to history and ancestry to construct identity, their perspectives are not documentary or historical. Their work is exploratory, propositional, and contemporary, and challenges others to consider themselves in the same way. To see the issue of identity so deeply rooted in the oeuvre of even just these eight international artists suggests that we are at a moment where this discussion is relevant.
