THROUGH THE EYE OF THE CAMERA
As Contact festival continues, new shows take up unique lenses. By Murray Whyte
Opening
The Family Camera: In this era of Instagrammed everything, the idea of a photograph as an object, let alone a precious one, is becoming more alien by the day. This show, at the Royal Ontario Museum, is less a nostalgia trip than a potent reminder of the vital role photography played in not just recording but creating family histories in a country as vast and complex as ours. More significantly,
The Family Camera focuses on families who came here from afar, and not all at once; and for whom photos, sent through the mail, promised a better world, across an ocean in a faraway land beyond imagining, but not beyond sight.
á At the ROM, May 6-Oct. 29. Ongoing Meera Margaret Singh, Jardim: Singh spent two months of 2012, on an artist’s residency in Jardim, an industrial town in Brazil whose provisional landscape — ramshackle structures for transient workers, and the subsequent lack of care such impermanence inevitably brings — provided fertile and abundant photographic subjects. The persistence of life amid the utter indifference of its surroundings — a ragged tree against an industrial wall; a giant, multi-armed aloe clenched tight and rooted in brick, a spiral of barbed wire above — give her pictures a seductive absurdity, laced with a quiet dread. That’s not all: Women weren’t allowed out in the evening in Jardim, whether for safety reasons or otherwise, leaving Singh to contemplate her daylight-only image-making under nightly house arrest, and infusing the images with a palpable threat. á At Zalucky Contemporary, 3044 Dundas St. W., until June 3. Ongoing
Celia Perrin Sidarous, a shape to your shadow: A site-specific installation as much as a photography exhibition, Sidarous’ eerily enigmatic, emphatically gorgeous images prompt notions of artifacts assembled in descriptive displays — bundles of intent, meticulously if mysteriously arranged. But meaning here is as slippery as the ground on which it stands: Campbell House, a historic Georgian mansion now housing an increasingly adventurous smallscale museum, stands as a remnant of the city’s formative past. But the building itself once stood elsewhere, shrouding its own claim to history in a fog of doubt, and providing a staging ground complicit with Sidarous’ own destabilizing intentions. á At Campbell House, until June 10.