Sleepy intimacy and a history of photography

Opening Nadia Belerique, Bed Island: It’s getting late, Belerique seems to suggest, with her evocation of the sleepy intimacy that our most personal of personal spaces inevitably carries.

The dimension suggests it — steel sculptures, some crumpled like unmade sheets, are roughly mattress-sized — but the images they carry do not: a spool of film, cracked glass, odd black spillage that steals depth away. Isolation and confusion collide with an expectation of the intimate, which ultimately is what happens to expectations if you dare make them too fervent or too pure, doesn’t it?

Belerique’s particular alchemy, of form and image, neither one in service to the other, works that strange magic: of freighting cool objecthood with the weight of emotional intelligence.

Opening Thursday, 6 to 8 p.m., at Daniel Faria Gallery, 188 St. Helens Ave., on until June 4 Jayce Salloum, A History of Photography: Although the title suggests something a tad ambitious for the modest confines of MKG127, Salloum’s Dundas West gallery, you can consider this a very tight, personal edit.

Salloum, a finalist for this year’s $50,000 Scotiabank Photography Prize, retraces his own steps through photography — a medium in which he’s worked for decades — and an intimate sense of connectedness and longing for the same pervades.

Work by such notables as Ansel Adams, Moyra Davey, Diane Evans, Lorraine Gilbert, Frank Hunter, Barbara Martz, Alison Rossiter, Barbara Spohr, Andy Sylvester and Steve Toth make appearances, among many more, crossing the artist’s path on his long, ongoing trip.

Opening Saturday, 2 to 5 p.m. at MKG127, 1445 Dundas St. W., on until May 21.