TORONTO’S ANNUAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL
Missed it? Oops! Well good news is you can still catch a few more exhibits running past the May 31 end date. Here’s Mixed Bag Mag’s comprehensive list of what’s still on for Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival.
“Exploring the photographic medium as a way of seeing, this year’s Festival theme, Field of Vision, frames a series of primary exhibitions and public installations.”
What lies outside our own field of vision? From gender to sexual orientation; culture, race, place; nature vs the unnatural; the understanding of new technology, the experience of a physical disability…
…sometimes it takes truly seeing what is right in front of us in order to shift our focus.
As artists, photographers will manipulate light, context, and composition to suit the telling of a ‘Truth’.
They use photography to explore how best to let someone into a world they might not be aware exists to experience stories they may not be able to hear. Something about seeing can move people into believing. An image can authenticate an experience not just for the artist but for the viewer.
“From the age of 14 – 17, the Toronto-based photographer Janieta Eyre developed a disorder that made it impossible to speak. As a consequence, many people gave up attempting to converse with Eyre and instead behaved as if she did not exist. The imposed silence and isolation had a curious effect on the artist’s development: in her silence, she began to have strange thoughts and to wonder if she was, in fact, invisible.”Read more…
“Using professional lighting and a medium-format film camera, Levine creates a studio within each home environment, positioning objects that appear within the frame. These settings explore private queer space as a realm for the development of community and the expression of genders and sexualities often marginalized within the public sphere.”Read more…
“Unreleased explores the gap that can exist between a person’s sense of belonging within a culture, and the culture’s opinion of that person. In this work, 2Fik performs multiple visions of “self,” while exploring the positive and negative prejudices that accompany visual perceptions of the “other.” This exhibition presents a series of dramatic tableau photographs in which characters from different cultures meet and evolve.”Read more…
“Dislocations brings together artists who explore the tenuous relationship between identity and place, and who investigate how movement has become a mode of being in the world during an era of globalization.” Read more…
“Deliberately referencing the constructed aesthetic of digital image-making—the pixel, the choice of red, green, or blue tape, and the surface/depth tension of altered focus—Miyoshi’s analogue self-portraits use metaphor to evoke a slew of contemporary questions about the status of the photographer/author and the referent/real in the digital age.”Read more…
“In recent years, Meryl McMaster has travelled to remote landscapes on journeys that have helped her begin to understand her place in the natural world. These processes of self-discovery continue when McMaster returns to her studio and incorporates what she has learned into her art practice through the exploration of new themes. In-Between Worlds is an expression of one of these themes: McMasters bicultural Aboriginal-European heritage, which she views as a synergistic strength rather than a struggle between opposing forces.” Read more…
“ The images have a surreal and ethereal quality that blurs the viewer’s concepts of space and reality. Pesce’s photographs depict both explicit and implicit narratives that investigate the idea of objectifying the female body.” Read more…
