WAR AT A DISTANCE
Stephen Andrews, Richard Johnson, Allyson Mitchell, Andrew Moodie, Greg Nelson, Suzanne Opton, Louie Palu, Adam Pettle, Jason Sherman, Francesco Simeti, and Graeme Smith
October 24 - November 21, 2009
Gallery TPW is pleased to present War at a Distance. A group exhibition of diverse works by both Canadian and international artists, War at a Distance explores practices of representation implicated in how Canadians are struggling to make sense of the war in Afghanistan. While war has always been mediated through image and narrative, new technologies and forms of documentary and artistic practice are continuing to alter the range of impressions available to a civic culture. Representations of the Afghan conflict have appeared in forms as diverse as contemporary art practice, television news reportage, documentary film, radio docudrama, personal YouTube videos, illustrated blogs and social media platforms. This new cultural landscape is embroiled in setting the terms for public conversations about Canada’s on-going involvement in a conflict that is taking place within a culture very different from our own. Blurring distinctions between art and journalism, documentary practice and aesthetics, galleries and broadcast media, war artists and combatant-diarists, The War at a Distance exhibition looks at the mediation of war and grapples with questions that emerge when artistic and journalistic forms are brought into relation.
Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7PM
Artist’s Lecture: Suzanne Opton
Ryerson University, Library Building, Room 72
Thursday, November 19, 7pm
Moderator: Sara Matthews, Assistant Professor in Culture and Conflict in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her work explores the affective difficulties of teaching and learning from traumatic historical events. Her current research considers how contemporary Canadian war artists are responding to Canada's mission in Afghanistan.
Matthews will begin the evening with a discussion of soldier-made YouTube videos as a viewing experience that disrupts the safety of critical or aestheticized distance.
Louie Palu, image detail from the series Zhari-Panjwai: Dispatches from Afghanistan, 2007
56 Ossington Avenue, Toronto
www.gallerytpw.ca
