Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

For the past 27 years, the annual Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival has extended a web of lens-based art throughout the city of Toronto and beyond. The festival partners with museums, galleries, artist-run centres, and holds an open call for exhibitions, to steep the city in photographic art for the entire month of May. In addition to these gallery exhibitions is a roster of public art projects that take place in outdoor spaces including on billboards, building façades, in gardens, under the expressway, and on the sides of streets, among other unique sites. The festival embraces the multiplicity of forms that is the photographic medium, featuring a robust survey of themes explored via A.I., social media, experimental film, collage, and more.

This year’s Core Program features a number of artists indigenous to Turtle Island, including, among others, the group exhibition Materialized at Critical Distance Centre for Curators; the public art project Grow Up #1 by artist Jake Kimble; and the outdoor installation at Onsite Gallery by photographer Robert Kautuk.

Critical Distance is located in Toronto’s 401 Richmond building–home to numerous galleries and artist-run-centres and considered a cultural hub in the city’s downtown core. In this space dedicated to curatorial inquiry, guest curator Ariel Smith has carefully assembled the exhibition Materialized, featuring works by artists Joi T. Arcand, Catherine Blackburn, Celeste Pedri-Spade, and Nadya Kwandibens. The exhibition delivers on its title, as Smith thoughtfully brings into dialogue works that speak to the tactility and tangibility of photographic objects, highlighting practices incorporating sewing, blanket making, beading, cutting, and photographic dioramas. While the physical gestures the artists use are distinct, one thread that weaves them together is their recontextualization of family photographs.  Reimagining these private images, the artists examine self-identity to unpack personal experiences and the ways they overlap with collective ones. Further, by centering intimate photographs taken by and for Indigenous families and communities, the artists reclaim a medium entrenched in the violence of colonial exploitation, consumption, and settler nation-building.

Anishinabekwe artist Celeste Pedri-Spade works primarily with photography and textiles and has a number of works on view in the exhibition. Ogjchidaakwewag (2016) is a blanket built around a reproduction of a family photograph from the 1960s and includes needlework that points to the topography of the artist’s home territory. Shirley’s Tobacco Bag (2014) brings together photography and beading, featuring a black-and-white beaded portrait on a tanned moose-hide bag. Beading is also a highlight of Catherine Blackburn’s work Scooped (2017), a series of family photos with notable gaps—holes cut out in amorphous shapes where one can assume a missing or lost family member once stood. The edges of the holes have been sutured, so to speak, reparatively outlined with gold beads, illuminating these haunting absences with a touching, mournful gesture.

Joi T. Arcand also makes use of cut outs. In Through that which is scene (2014), the artist placed carefully cut images of family members from her personal photographs and placed them into a dioramic tableau to explore the relationship between memory and family narrative. Nadya Kwandibens’ work extends the exhibition offsite, for an outdoor installation of their image Shiibaashka’igan: Honouring the Sacred Jingle Dress (2019), presented as a street-level billboard at 180 Shaw Street.

A short walk from Critical Distance is the public installation by Jake Kimble, a Chipewyan (Dëne Sųłıné) artist from Treaty 8 Territory in the Northwest Territories, curated by Emmy Lee Wall through a partnership with Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival. Presented on the north façade of the building at 460 King Street West, Grow Up #1 (2019) is part of the series Grow Up, consisting of portraits of the artist at various ages, with text overlaid. Kimble’s practice is rooted in imagery and text that reveal the humour and absurdity of everyday power dynamics. For #1, the artist foregrounds a childhood image of himself dressed as a cowboy, standing in a kitchen in front of the refrigerator. This image is overlaid with sticker-like, almost three-dimensional-appearing text, placing the young artist behind the words: I was told peace was mine to keep. The juxtaposition further problematizes the violent binary of “cowboys and indians,” and brings to mind the damaging settler-colonial narrative of the “Western” film genre.

East of this site is the mural-sized aerial image Sea Ice Break Up (2019) by Nunavut-based Inuit artist Robert Kautuk, installed across the exterior windows of Onsite Gallery as part of their ongoing program Up Front: Inuit Public Art at Onsite Gallery. Kautuk creates his photographs through drone footage, providing a poetic, vast, and alarming perspective on how quickly the landscape of the north is changing, with an urgency that locals live with and witness every day.

In addition to these exhibitions and public projects is a group show at the Art Gallery of Ontario called We Are Story: The Canada Now Acquisition, and includes work by Raymond Boisjoly, Robert Kautuk, asinnajaq, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection is holding a solo exhibition of work by Meryl McMaster entitled Bloodline.

The Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival runs throughout the month of May. Visit scotiabankcontactphoto.com for full details.

IMAGE CAPTIONS

Photo 1: Robert Kautuk, Sea Ice Break Up, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Photo 2: Meryl McMaster, The Grass Grows Deep, 2022, from the series ôhkominak âcimowina / Stories of my Grandmothers. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

Photo 3: Nadya Kwandibens, Shiibaashka’igan: Honouring the Sacred Jingle Dress (2019), Courtesy of the artist.

Photo 4: Celeste Pedri-Spade, Shirley’s Tobacco Bag, 2014 (delica beads, brain-tanned moose hide). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Rebecca Bose

Photo 5: Catherine Blackburn, Scooped (detail), 2017 (photos, 24kt-gold-plated beads, seed beads, thread, 12x9cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Photo 6: Jake Kimble, Grow Up #1, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.