STILL REVOLUTION: RADICAL CHANGE WITHIN THE LANDSCAPE
Transforming urban spaces with photography, these site-specific installations throughout the city invite reflections upon the evolving nature of the photographic medium and the history of visual representation.
Presented from May 1 - 31 with the support of Hewlett-Packard (Canada) CO., BlackBerry, Beyond Digital Imaging, 3M, Genstar, Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
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MAY 1 - 31
SHILPA GUPTA: DON'T SEE DON'T HEAR DON'T SPEAK
HARBOURFRONT CENTRE
Shilpa Gupta’s work subversively probes religion, race, class, gender and local situational politics. She provokes questions about our core beliefs, about how we think and who we are. Aiming towards the possibility of social change through art, Gupta offers critical opinions on a visually saturated society ruled by politics and commerce. She attempts to surpass the negative implications of nationalism by dissecting and re-presenting societal and individual structures and codes.
The principle to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” was made popular in India by Gandhi in a speech that stood for values of positivism at the birth of a new nation. Gupta’s interpretation of this pictorial tenet – the three monkeys – in Don’t See Don’t Hear Don’t Speak (2008), suggests that the Gandhian theory of nonviolence and other dreamed-of principles, have been violated and broken. These images bring together Gupta’s concerns about social classification, and emphasize her conviction that power, politics and rapid globalization lead to social rupture and inequality. Gupta’s images at Harbourfront Centre address her examination of real and perceived borders and collapsed geographies resultant of globalization. The shipping container placed on the shore of Lake Ontario references the long-haul transportation of goods in contrast with the split-second transmission of the digital images from the artist overseas. This juxtaposition of the container and the banners reinforces Gupta's observation that Mumbai, India can seem closer to Toronto than to a remote village a few hundred kilometres away.
Gupta was born in Mumbai, where she currently lives and creates interactive video, websites, photographs, objects, sound and public performances. She has exhibited in a number of prestigious museums and galleries including the Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and Delhi, the ICC in Tokyo, New Museum in New York and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico.
Presented in partnership with Harbourfront Centre.
231 Queens. Lakefront, between 207 & 231 Queen's Quay West
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MAY 1 - 31
MICHAEL FLOMEN: EVENT IN THE LANDSCAPE
TORONTO PEARSON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT - TERMINAL 1
As Marshall McLuhan once commented, “nobody can commit photography alone.” Michael Flomen is a photographer who collaborates with nature. Using available light to produce large-scale photograms (camera-less photographs) he captures the motion and effects of circling fireflies, flowing water and falling snow. In his abstract images created on light sensitive photographic paper, Flomen reveals a universe of occurrences. Working in Vermont and Quebec at night, Flomen places photo paper under water or on land amidst the climatic effects of nature. While Flomen’s approach is beyond his full control, he has mastered his technique to create astounding and powerful photograms from physical and natural phenomena.
Event in the Landscape produced from a selection of Flomen's photograms created during the last ten years, explores territories outside the confines of conventional photography. These digitized images, placed along the moving sidewalks at Pearson Airport’s Terminal 1, evoke the timeless qualities of the earth, the atmosphere and the solar system, set amidst the context of modern flight. While new technologies are redefining the content and process of photographic imagery in the 21st century, Flomen’s work recalls some of the earliest known photographic images – those produced by Henry Talbot Fox in the 1830s. Flomen’s imagery is grounded in the present day, reflecting what we do not normally see but intuitively recognize as familiar. His images emphasize the actions of light and the physics of space. In partnership with nature, he transforms the way the environment is perceived. John K. Grande
Michael Flomen lives and works in Montreal and is represented by Galerie Pangée. He has exhibited extensively throughout North America and Europe and his work is part of many collections internationally. Flomen’s work is included in the book The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography and is part of the related travelling exhibition.
Presented in partnership with the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.
Hwys 427 & 401
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MAY 1 - 31
GWENAËL BÉLANGER: LE GRAND FATRAS
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART COURTYARD
Gwenaël Bélanger characterizes his approach to image making to that of a bricoleur or handyman. His process begins with a vivid mental picture resulting from his close observation of the everyday world and its mundane objects. Like a construction site, his creative space expands as his images begin to take shape.
Using digital technology and photographic processes, Bélanger playfully and deftly assembles multiple stills into one picture plane. He manipulates forms and transforms objects, combining perspectives to reveal a fictitious point of view. Set within a “real” scene, his images of an imagined realm of possibilities maintain uncanny believability.
Echoing the parking lot setting, Bélanger’s image Le Grand Fatras (2005) (The Big Clutter) is reproduced as a massive mural and adhered to a building in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art’s courtyard. Displayed in the same location as the CONTACT 2008 mural by Robert Burley that documented the demolition of a Kodak factory, Belanger’s image could be interpreted as the downpour that followed the explosion in Burley’s photograph. Objects propelled into the air, rebellious and playful, may well be understood as fallout from the demise of the photochemical era or representatives of the material glut of our existence. Open to interpretation, Bélanger’s work freezes moments in time, leaving the viewer to imagine the inevitable smash of his objects on the ground.
Montreal-based Gwenaël Bélanger has exhibited his work in numerous galleries and museums in Quebec including the Galérie de l’UQAM, le Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and internationally at the 11th Visual Arts Biennial in Pancevo, Serbia and Montenegro and the triennial l’Art qui fait boum!. He is represented by the Graff Galerie in Montreal. For CONTACT, Bélanger’s work is also in the exhibition Still Motions at the Gladstone Hotel.
Presented in partnership with MOCCA.
952 Queen St W, Toronto
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MAY 1 - 31
DAN BERGERON: THE UNADDRESSED
ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM
For the better part of a decade, Dan Bergeron, AKA fauxreel, has been creating subversive, photo-based street works in Canada, England and the United States. Many of his projects tackle current social and political themes, while others re-contextualize the physical spaces that he liberates. Bergeron documents people who are rarely focused on by the mass media and challenges the predominant visual culture of advertising – its presence, location and scale.
The Unaddressed (2009) focuses on the under-housed, giving voice to their personal opinions. By photographing his subjects holding a cardboard sign that announces their concerns, the artist challenges preconceived notions of homelessness. Working against the minimal exchange between the homeless and passers-by, Bergeron’s images use the trope of the panhandling sign to disclose messages usually ignored or unspoken.
One pair of Bergeron’s giant figures stand sentinel outside the ROM’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Inside the museum, life-sized figures appear on the walls, wheat-pasted throughout public spaces. They lead to Housepaint, Phase 2: Shelter, Canada’s first major exhibition of street art. By focusing on individual stories and the issues of homelessness and poverty, The Unaddressed serves as the final of five installations commissioned by the ROM’s ICC and as a public installation for CONTACT.
Dozens more life-sized figures are scattered throughout the streets of Toronto, grounding this project firmly within the street art genre. Pasted up in the streets, Bergeron’s images of the homeless take on a very different meaning: they represent their subjects within the places that they call home, and confront the viewer in the places in which we all collectively exist.
Presented in partnership with the Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) at the ROM.
100 Queen's Park
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MAY 1 - 31
LOUIE PALU: WAR ZONE GRAFFITI
QUEEN WEST AREA & ACE LANE
Guerrilla postering, like graffiti, randomly appears at the whim of anonymous scribes. In Louie Palu’s project, guerrilla postering also evokes the chaos of a war zone. Palu’s photographs of graffiti were taken in Afghanistan’s Southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand while he was embedded with Canadian, British and American troops in 2008. From commemorative memorials etched by soldiers into concrete barriers, to renderings of artillery drawn by civilians on the walls of abandoned houses, Palu’s work highlights the enduring consequences of naïve expression. It also draws attention to the force of the photographic medium, transposing cave-like drawings from a war zone to a city across the globe.
Far from Kandahar, Palu’s images infiltrate the relative peacefulness of Queen Street West and serve as cunning reminders of Canada’s present involvement in the war in Afghanistan. The Bovine, with its post-apocalyptic style synonymous with graffiti, is the project’s ground zero. Palu redeploys army latrine scrawl from Afghanistan in the club’s washrooms, and in the back alley he lines up a regimented display of the full series of images. Contextualizing his images of grafitti, Palu’s combat videography represents some of the most unique, in-depth, front-line coverage of the fighting since Canada began operations in Afghanistan. His coverage of Canadian military activity in Zhari District (considered to be the birthplace of the Taliban) feeds the worldwide desire for instantaneous video footage that is challenging the future of still photojournalism.
Palu was born in Toronto and is currently based in Washington. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally, and published in sources such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, The Walrus, MacLeans, The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Palu is represented by ZUMA Press.
Ace Lane accessible via Ryerson Ave / Shanghai Cowgirl, 538 Queen St W
Screenings at The Bovine Thursday May 7, 14, 21, 28 at 10 PM (20 mins), 543 Queen St W
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MAY 1 - 31
FASTWURMS, CHRISTIE PEARSON, MARK CLINTBERG, THIS DAY OF CHANGE - COURRIER JAPON MAGAZINE, ANNETTE MANGAARD, JOHN MARRIOTT, DARREN ODONNELL, GEORGETTE PETERS, MARTIN REIS, CHRYSANNE STATHACOS, HO TAM, CAROLYN TRIPP: WHAT'S YOUR REVOLUTION?
TTC SUBWAY STATIONS WITH SCREENS
Within a climate of massive social and political change, artists provoke, stimulate and motivate Toronto commuters with enlightened calls to action, and artistic responses to the idea of inciting revolt. What’s Your Revolution? presents photographic imagery every 10 minutes on a network of over 270 LCD screens in the Toronto subway system – a platform for the sharing of radical imaginings.
FASTWURMS’ project venerates the Donkey Sanctuary of Canada and the Cats Anonymous shelter of Orton, Ontario. John Marriott’s Dandelionheart takes commuters on a panoramic journey through space and time to a land wherein images of hope provide a backdrop for hypothetical futures. Kisses You, by Darren O’Donnell, radically proposes that making out should occur in public, and puts every TTC commuter in the position of a lover. Carolyn Tripp’s work is designed as a Public Service Announcement for her ongoing “Gaming and Tourism Commission” project, which addresses the intersection of zoological and municipal concerns.
Variously quiet, riotous, playful, radical, personal and far-reaching, the visual stories played out on the modern-day soapbox of our subway platforms have the power to evoke change.
Curated by Sharon Switzer and co-produced by Onestop Media Group and Art for Commuters.
