COLD, SNAP!
For Katherine Ylitalo, the invitation to curate a group photography show came with an unspoken challenge: create a representative sample of the ways contemporary artists are working, but have the whole thing cohere thematically. Her solution, as evidenced in Winter
Garden at VivaneArt, was novel: the common thread lies in what is not directly depicted in the photographs. “There is an absence in a lot of these works,” she says.
Ylitalo worked with Tara Westermann, VivianeArt’s managing director, and Jenna Klein-Waller, the gallery’s associate director, to select five artists for the exhibition and to cover “a wide range of how people are working with image making” as well as making interesting thematic connections.
Laura St. Pierre gathers flowers and literally preserves them. “She pickles them so the colours leech out,” Ylitalo says. The denuded plants are then arranged and photographed, often with dramatic lighting. Travis Lutley has contributed a series of photographs taken in the home of a friend who has since moved to a new residence. Pamela Norrish has taken old photographs and cut out key portions, making them, in Ylitalo’s words “more interesting because of what’s missing.” Dana Prediger uses taxidermy to create surreal tableaux of where the wild and the urban connect. Tomas Jonsson is submitting an installation called Home Turf that consists of 100 photographs derived from the papers of his late father, who was a carpentry instructor. Ylitalo says Jonsson has identified papers—teaching notes, bills, invoices—that “represent larger aspects of his father’s life.” The artist then slips these into envelopes, photographs the letters and mails them to his father’s former home, which is no longer standing, thus consigning them to Canada Post’s undeliverable mail warehouse in Mississauga.
Jonsson’s approach is a bit involved, but it has an elegant outcome, one it shares with the other artists in the show. “They are thinking about photography itself and how we use it,” Ylitalo says, in what amounts to a kind of nutsand-bolts summary. In a more ethereal vein, and in keeping with her overarching theme, she notes how a winter garden can be beautiful in its own right but also in the way it provokes recollections of its former splendour. The five artists in Winter Garden are exploring “how photography has its impetus in memory—it’s almost like creating a memory.”
Winter Garden: Until Feb. 24 at VivianeArt.