“La longue nuit de Mégantic” is not merely the culmination of a year of travels to grieving Lac-Mégantic presenting the breadth of the loss, but also the latest installment of a serial exploring how societies overcome troubled pasts.
photography
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.
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.
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.