The Contact Photography Festival launches across Toronto today with exhibitions at almost 200 venues. Here are 6 projects that are must-sees for Canadian Art’s team.
Gordon Parks at Nicholas Metivier Gallery and Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue Gallery
How odd, but there it is in Contact’s catalogue: these are the first Canadian exhibitions of the late Gordon Parks. A Renaissance man, Parks is perhaps best known for his photographs documenting the civil rights movement, though it is important to note that he wrote novels and poetry, directed films (most famously the 1971 blaxploitation classic Shaft) and, in his early days, shot innovative fashion spreads for Life and Vogue. One powerful image now on view is Parks’s famous, scathing 1942 reworking of American Gothic, with cleaning woman Ella Watson standing with mop and broom in front of an American flag in the Farm Security Administration building in Washington, DC, where Parks worked at the time under Roy Stryker. At Metivier are striking archival pigment prints demonstrating widespread segregation, and portraits. The latter are the exclusive focus of the BAND Gallery show, featuring famous (Eartha Kitt, Muhammad Ali) and non-famous alike. Runs April 24 to May 24 at Nicholas Metivier Gallery and April 25 to August 3 at BAND Gallery.—David Balzer, associate editor
The Sochi Project at the Contact Gallery
Created by the Dutch photographer/writer team of Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen, The Sochi Project is an exercise in crowdfunded “slow journalism” that offers a close look at the evolving site of the 2014 Winter Olympics between 2009 and 2013. Taking cues from the great Russian photographer Boris Mikhailov, The Sochi Project makes a compelling study in unresolved social and political contrasts. As van Bruggen describes it: “Just 20 kilometers away is the conflict zone Abkhazia. To the east, the Caucasus Mountains stretch into obscure and impoverished breakaway republics such as North Ossetia and Chechnya. On the coast, old Soviet-era sanatoria stand shoulder to shoulder with the most expensive hotels and clubs of the Russian Riviera.” Evolving troubles in Ukraine and the recent annexation of Crimea bring a whole new order of topicality to the project, which is also viewable online at www.thesochiproject.org. Runs May 1 to 31.—Richard Rhodes, editor
Stan Douglas at the Ryerson Image Centre
Stan Douglas has been busy. In January, the internationally renowned photographer and filmmaker’s latest video installation Luanda-Kinshasa opened to critical raves at David Zwirner in New York; in March, his multimedia stage production Helen Lawrence premiered alongside an exhibition of new photo works at Presentation House Gallery in his hometown of Vancouver; and just last week, Douglas launched his groundbreaking interactive media project Circa 1948 at the Tribeca Film Festival. For Contact, Douglas lands at the Ryerson Image Centre for an exhibition exclusively devoted to his photographic images. The show, curated by fellow photographer Robert Bean, is the result of Douglas’s 2013 Scotiabank Photography Award win; a notable achievement for an artist who has become best known over the past two decades for meticulously devised and cinematically complex film and video works. It’s clear from this tight gathering of works, however, that the momentum behind Douglas’s moving-image works has much to do with his abiding interest in and ongoing experimentation with the narrative density that can be packed and unpacked in a photographic “still.” Ranging across time and place from the urban demise of his monumental East Vancouver streetscape Every Building on 100 West Hastings to the invented dramas of his recent Midcentury Studio and Disco Angola series, these are important images that challenge not only how we see history but also how we understand the visual mechanics behind those perspectives. Not to be missed. Runs May 1 to June 1.—Bryne McLaughlin, managing editor
Owen Kydd at Brookfield Place
It will require a well-trained eye to catch the subtle movements of Owen Kydd’s durational photographs, displayed on digital-screen kiosks and set in the transitory commuter space of the Allen Lambert Galleria at Brookfield Place. Kydd’s images, which sit between photography and cinema, also incorporate techniques of assemblage and histories of still-life painting that reference mundane retail display, all bathed in a warm California palette. I’m looking forward to seeing how these pieces, in all their dollar-store-aesthetic glory, contrast with Santiago Calatrava’s pristine and skeletal vaulted corridor—and also seeing which passers-by will risk halting the flow of bodies to take a closer look. Runs April 30 to May 30.–Britt Gallpen, web intern
“Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Caribbean Photography” at Harbourfront Centre
Thank god for Ken Montague. Since founding Wedge Curatorial Projects in 1997, this passionate Toronto collector and arts supporter (and dentist!) has been a key driver or partner in notable exhibitions featuring artists of African or Caribbean descent. “Position as Desired,” launched in 2010 at the Royal Ontario Museum, also recently showed at the Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax and shed light on a number of talents including Dawit L. Petros. In 2011, Montague (via Wedge) co-presented the remarkable “Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba” exhibition at the Design Exchange. Already this year, Montague drew attention to local up-and-comer Jon Blak’s documentation of changes in Toronto’s Eglinton West strip in an exhibition at the Gladstone Hotel. And now, for Contact, Montague lends a hand to “Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Caribbean Photography,” which highlights the work of 18 photo-based artists from 7 Caribbean countries—in a project installed in 4 shipping containers on the Lake Ontario shore outside the Power Plant, no less. Drawing on a recent book of the same title, “Pictures from Paradise”—also co-curated by the book’s editors Melanie Archer and Mariel Brown—promises to go well beyond common tourist images into complex issues of migration, race and identity. Runs May 1 to 25 with an opening May 3 from 5 to 7 p.m and a panel May 4 at 6 p.m. at the Gladstone Hotel.—Leah Sandals, online editor
Annie MacDonnell at the Toronto Reference Library
When I was a child, in the few years of my pre-adolescence before the Internet, my best friend’s mother worked the reference desk at Saskatoon’s public library. She told us stories of the questions people phoned in, and together with older siblings, we tittered over the inane queries we might ask through the anonymity of the telephone receiver. Annie MacDonell’s residency/installation Pictures Become Objects, Objects Become Events engages this moment when curiosity could not yet be answered by search engines. Working with images from the Toronto Reference Library Picture Collection—a set gathered from popular media sources by several individual (mostly female) librarians—MacDonell re-illuminates the handpicked nature of library reference materials. Her project probes the reference collection as a kind of alternative archive, suggesting that the women who contributed to it have put something of their identities, their politics, and themselves—however slight—into their inclusions and omissions. While in residence throughout the month of May, MacDonell’s project promises to re-perform the process of gathering these images through an evolving vitrine installation, a mural assemblage, a performance with Maïder Fortuné, and ultimately an artist book. Runs May 5 to 30, with performance May 31 at 4 p.m.—Alison Cooley, intern
The Contact Festival runs May 1 to 31 in Toronto, with an official festival launch May 2 from 7 to 10 p.m. at MOCCA.
