gallery44 reblogged
I’ve UPDATED my editorial/portrait portfolio. It is available here: http://www.jamiecampbellphotography.com/editorial.htm
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is a non-profit artist-run centre committed to photography as a multi-faceted and ever-changing art form, offering a unique platform for reflection and dialogue on contemporary photography and its related practices. We encourage exhibition proposals from local, national and international artists at all stages of their careers who are innovative in their use of materials and approach to photography.
gallery44 reblogged
The Secret Lives of Housewives and a History of Mind Control: The Kitchen - by Amber Christensen
The Kitchen, is a multi channel performance-based video installation, by Winnipeg artist Sarah Anne Johnson installed at Gallery 44 as part of the Images Off Screen presentations. The work is composed of 15 monitors mounted in varying compositions around the gallery, each displaying a view of a brightly lit kitschy 1950s kitchen and a backwards facing masked archetypal housewife character. The back gallery video offers a bird’s eye view of the same figure, but this time shot in black and white with the camera in constant rotation following the movements of the trapped housewife on the floor performing a sort of claustrophobic choreography.
Although Johnson’s work adopts the language of retro-feminist wave critiques of gendered binaries, she uses this aesthetic in a way that moves beyond reductionist readings, allowing an emotionally rich exploration of both feminism(s) and her own family history. Johnson has been delving into her family archives for a number of years (in her capacity as a photographer she created the series House on Fire (2009), but turning to performance she embodies the fractured figure of her maternal grandmother, who was a victim of grossly unethical psychological experiments conducted in the 1950s/60s.
Unknown perhaps to many Canadians, Canada was a central testing place for psychotropic drugs, including LSD as well as various forms of experimental mind control agents from the mid 1950s to the 1960s. Much of this research was funded under the umbrella of a CIA project ominously titled Project MKUltra. Sounding like a Bradbury penned dystopian novel, these aberrant histories have been making their way into current awareness through academic research and the occasional magazine and television coverage. This history is intriguing for it’s unbelievable fictional-like qualities and sometimes the individual stories get lost along the way as they take on novelty-esque qualities.
In many ways, this work does conjure up sentiments of the well-worn 1970s feminist slogans, like ‘the personal is political,’ but, however redundant this slogan has become or however flawed 1970s feminism may be, here the personal is a necessary micro lens to remind us that these fantastical histories have both bodily and psychological impacts on real individuals. Johnson’s grandmother after seeking help for postpartum depression at the Allen Memorial Institute at the McGill Hospital in the 1950s, became a non consensual test subject for these psychotropic experiments. Johnson’s inverted inhabitance of her grandmother enacts the damage inflicted on her grandmother that carried through to Johnson. The legacy of early feminist performance and video art can be seen in The Kitchen, but this engagement is not pastiche nor the end goal of the work. The Kitchen is rooted in a personal and painful history that moves us beyond the believe-it-or-not angle of a little known but highly disturbing episode in Canadian history.
In addition to The Kitchen at Gallery 44, Johnson’s live choreographed performance Hospital Hallway, which delves further into her Grandmother’s history is taking place at Division Gallery’s Arsenal space for a final performance on Saturday April 16th at 2pm. To guarantee a seat RSVP to toronto@galeriedivision.com
You can also read the interview between Images Artistic Director, Amy Fung and Sarah Anne Johnson conducted for the Gallery 44 exhibition RIGHT HERE
gallery44 reblogged
Thomas Ruff - m.a.r.s. 13, 2011
Chromogenic Print (340 x 246 cm)
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Taryn Simon
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Taryn Simon
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Walead Beshty - Passages, 2009
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Brendan Fowler Spring 2012 - Fall 2012 (“Miles” Security Jacket, Chocolate Hat, Stack of Matt’s Plates from Party, Andrea’s Sweater) 2013
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Lisa Oppenheim
Submission Guidelines
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is a non-profit artist-run centre committed to photography as a multi-faceted and ever-changing art form, offering a unique platform for reflection and dialogue on contemporary photography and its related practices. We encourage exhibition proposals from local, national and international artists at all stages of their careers who are innovative in their use of materials and approach to photography.
gallery44 reblogged
Huang Yong Ping , 1992
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2016
Source: stevenbeckly.com
Salon 44 Selections from Jordan Browne, G44 Intern
I love the photograph Lukhla by Sanjay Mehta. The use of light and shadow is really beautiful. There is also this play with appearance versus reality with the covering of the child’s face that creates a sort of dreamy, fantastical quality to the image.
Sanjay Mehta, Lukhla, Nepal- 2005, 2016
Another photograph I love is Scott Conarroe’s Kick Beijing. What initially drew me to this image was the oddness of the situation. I love that the drama depicted almost seems staged. The aggressive yet casual body language makes it difficult to figure out what is actually going on, allowing for various interpretations of the photograph.
Scott Conarroe, Kick, Beijing, 2012
Salon 44 Selections from Jocelyn Reynolds, G44 committee member
Looking at Ruth Kaplan's Hot Spring, Italy instantly transports me. All of a sudden I'm reimmersed in that time when our towels cloaked our tiny bodies entirely, shielding our fragile, shivering shapes from the unforgiving world above the water. There was a whole other world underneath that towel, cozy and secret.
Salon 44 Selections from Robyn York, G44 staff member
One of my favourite parts of laying out a group exhibition like Salon 44 is unwrapping an artwork that makes you wonder which way is up? Practically speaking—pretty essential for hanging a show, but on a less superficial level, something that used to be much more common when looking at paintings, and now something shared between many of the photo and lens-based pieces I have selected from *many* favourites in Salon 44.
I could go all the way back to trips to the eye doctor as a toddler, where my opthamologist would show me pictures of nearly identical dogs through the phoropter and ask which one was upside down, and which one was blurry—but this is supposed to stay under 500 words...
Robert Bean's work, Etude (for Marconi) #5, which was recently exhibited at Beaverbrook Art Gallery, tackles communication, disorientation and divination in a way that only an artist-writer-educator who has looked at hundreds of thousands of artworks can. I love a piece that makes me simultaneously think about being a kid, staring at clouds from underneath the power lines at the cottage, and being an adult who worries about things like buzzing from the same power lines and windmill noise pollution. Bean’s full series is available from Circuit Gallery, and includes an artist statement that makes me want to backspace backspace backspace.
Sarah Sands Phillips, recent Proof alumni, Untitled No. 12 (Photographs of Canada) is from a series of some of my favourite manipulated found photographs. How tricky, to take something as archetypal and unwavering as a textbook photograph of Canadian landscape and make it your own, through removal and considerate orientation shifting.
One of the few snow scenes in Salon 44′s sunny offering, is Avalanche, Sigerfjord Norway by Kristie MacDonald, from her series Mechanisms for Correcting the Past, shown at Gallery 44 in 2014. This installation featured a mechanical table that lifted a projector in order to correct the horizon line in an archival photograph of a house collapsing into flooded land. MacDonald’s perspective shift is mesmerizing, and along with careful printing and deliberate framing, crushes any debate about authorship, ownership and the archive.
Chris Shepherd has one of the most interesting, evolving practices I have seen. If you don’t follow his blog, add a bookmark now. His three views onto Lake Huron make me miss the summer, or maybe I miss the seasons that are a bit more nuanced in tone between overcast white and minus 30 C blazing blue. Read his thoughts on circles and the horizon line. You’ll be hooked.
Robert Bean, Etude (for Marconi) #5, 2014, 44″x32″, $2500 framed
Sarah Sands Philips, Untitled No. 12 (Photographs of Canada), 2015, Manipulated Found Photographic Print on Paper, 38x30cm, $1000 framed
Kristie MacDonald, Avalanche, Sigerfjord Norway, 2013, Digital Print, 12″x12″, Edition: 1/5, $650 framed, $550 unframed
Chris Shepherd, Huron 180 Degrees, 2015, C-Print, 12″x12″, Edition: 1/7, $200
Chris Shepherd, Huron 230 Degrees, 2015, C-Print, 12″x12″, Edition: 1/7, $200
Chris Shepherd, Huron 45 Degrees, 2015, C-Print, 12″x12″, Edition: 1/7, $200
These artworks and others are available for sale at Salon 44 - A fundraiser for Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, 401 Richmond St W, Suite 120, Toronto, ON March 4-20, 2016 Opening Friday March 4, 6-10 PM
Pumpkin Patch-Union Square, NY, 2015, Robert Caspary
Mary, Petite Vallée, Gaspésie, 2014, Eric Garsonnin