t Making contact
Massive annual event showcases canadian and international photographic artists
he month-long Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, now underway, kicks off Toronto’s arts and culture season. Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is the largest photography event in the world, a must-see for artists and art lovers around the globe.
Now in its 19th year, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is not your typical display of works. Exhibits are presented at over 175 venues across the Greater Toronto Area, including museums, galleries, universities, and public Scotiabank Photography Award. Works will appear on Pattison billboards across the country. More than 1,500 Canadian and international artists and photographers – both established and emerging – are represented.
“The Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto opens its season with the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival every year,” says Paul Roth, RIC’s director. “This is a very important show that highlights the very best in Canadian photography.”
At the heart of RIC’s festival installation this year is an exhibit of works by Canadian photographic artist Mark Ruwedel, winner of the 2014 Scotiabank Photography Award.
Scotiabank Photography Award was established to recognize the accomplishments and raise the profile of Canadian photographers. “Mark Ruwedel’s refined, beautiful and minimalistic photographs of austere landscapes have, for decades, drawn more and more appreciation,” says Roth, co-curator of the exhibit with Gaëlle Morel. “He is precisely the type of person this award was designed to honour. He deserves more recognition and more audiences.”
What is most captivating about Ruwedel’s work is the subtle and lyrical ways in which he documents the impact of humans on our world, adds Roth.
“They may be traces in the earth – evidence of an ancient trail where people have walked the same path for hundreds of years, or more concrete evidence such as railroad trestles or tunnels through mountains,” he says. “At the same time his work is showing outward indicators of human presence on the land, it is also showing the immutability of the earth itself: The toughness of a rocky cliff or body of water. His work is honest in how nature functions and how our relationship with it is visible through generations.”
At Toronto’s Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art (MOCCA), artist and writer Chris Wiley curates Part Picture. As the title suggests, this exhibit offers a collection of works that co-mingle photography with other media, such as sculpture.
“This exhibit includes a group of young photographers whose works represent today’s principal conversation in fine arts photography in North America, and perhaps the world — the creation of a photographic object that is only part picture,” says Wiley. To complement the works of today’s photographic innovators, Wiley has included works of artists from a previous generation, including Ellen Carey and Jan Groover.
“These artists did not gain as much recognition as they should have,” says Wiley. “However, the current conversation is giving newfound relevance to these innovators of their time, creating a new lineage in photographic history.” Carey’s spectacular 14-foothigh and 25-foot-long Mourning Wall of degraded Polaroid negatives, can be revisited today as a representation of mourning in general, or of the transition of photography away from its roots as a material object, he explains. “Groover’s selection of work from the 1980s and 1990s are quite sculptural in nature, and her kitchen still lifes point the finger at the male-dominated ethic of the time,” adds Wiley.
Additional primary exhibits include Surplus at the Clint Roenisch Gallery, a show that takes inspiration from the plethora of images in the digital realm; Dalston Anatomy at the Contact Gallery, a showcase by Lorenzo Vitturi of the cultural transformations at one of London, England’s oldest street markets; and artistic interpretations of advertising conventions, cultural codes and consumer lifestyles on Pattison Billboards in eight major cities across the country.
“The Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is like lightning in a bottle,” states Roth. “I encourage everyone to come out and experience it.”