Cyprien Gaillard’s most recent 3D video installation Nightlife (2015) is a riveting visual and auditory experience. Moved by gusts of wind, the elongated branches of Hollywood Juniper trees sway in slow motion, dancing ecstatically as though rejoicing in their emergence.
photography
The act of representation is a process of mediation, of formalizing ideological frameworks, of exercising power dynamics, and of producing relationships between subjects and objects. An apparatus for self-imaging, representation both permits and precludes the naming and seeing of ourselves and others in the public realm, often resulting in dissonance, differentiation and exclusion.
PAVED Arts, the new media artist-run centre born out of the Saskatoon Photographers Gallery, has been a longtime advocate and supporter of local artists with contemporary practices in photography. PAVED brings a conceptually rich addition to the 2016 festival with an exhibition of local Saskatoon photographers working in film photography, “Resolution,” curated by artistic director David LaRiviere.
In-Between Worlds is an ongoing series by Ottawa-based artist Meryl McMaster that grapples with complex questions of identity; addressing the ways contemporary Indigenous and cross-cultural identities are represented.
Figures falling apart into pixelated existence.
Broken down.
Disintegrated.
Ed Spence and Dana Claxton embrace this technological way of digesting or reading, absorbing or even understanding the information held within images. Divided from their original context, in a way, images reverted to analog form illustrate more of a division than a unification of knowledge.
The first time the Vancouver Capture Photography Festival was held was in October of 2013. In a city known for its rich and dedicated photography culture, it was extremely well received. Two years later, it’s back; a soon-to-be annual event, Capture aims to “increase knowledge and appreciation of photography and lens-based art by emphasizing the cultural importance of photography in all its forms,” a mission succinctly described by festival executive director, Kim Spencer-Narin.
“Untitled (new visions)” curated by executive director Tarin Hughes, is the second collaboration between artists Barbara Hobot and Maggie Groat. Their objects in the AKA exhibition space are generally small-scale works, brightly colored in rainbow or natural hues.
“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.
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.