calendario eventi  :: 

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28/9/2012

Two exhibitions

Ryerson Image Centre RIC, Toronto

The Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) is a national and international centre of excellence for the study, teaching, research and exhibition of photography and related media. We are a fully integrated, vibrant contributor and active partner within the academic fabric of the University, the cultural network of greater Toronto, and an ever-expanding international community of exchange and collaboration. We develop programs that speak to and welcome interested parties from many different walks of life, including students, faculty, researchers, artists, curators, as well as the general public.

The RIC boasts three inter-related areas of activity. Our engaging exhibition program addresses topics of social, cultural, historical and aesthetic concern from a variety of contemporary points of view. Our world-class research centre conducts cutting edge primary research, and offers workshops, conferences and number of publication programs. And thirdly, we entertain an active acquisitions policy, built upon the solid foundation of our archival holdings, which include the famous Black Star Collection of approximately 292,000 photojournalistic prints, a sizable fine art photographic collection, as well as several world-renowned artist archives.

The RIC, located in the heart of campus life and in the core of downtown Toronto, is one of a number of major projects to grow out of President Sheldon Levy’s vision for Ryerson University, which defines Ryerson as one of the most dynamic institutions of higher learning in the country and a ‘City Builder’ in the centre of Toronto. Our plans are part of a growing trend toward creative inclusion and openness that will bring the world to Toronto and carry the reputation of Ryerson University and our city into the world.

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Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection
Main Gallery, Student Gallery, Media Wall

Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection focuses on the Black Star Collection as seen through the eyes of internationally-renowned Canadian contemporary artists Stephen Andrews, Christina Battle, Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Stan Douglas, Vera Frenkel, Vid Ingelevics, David Rokeby and Michael Snow.

Each artist has read the archive in their own way, selected images with which to work, and created a newly commissioned art installation in response. By commissioning new works, curators Doina Popescu and Peggy Gale enable vibrant examinations, complex re-contextualizations and exciting contemporary re-interpretations of the historic images.

As viewers of these artists’ works we are offered the rare opportunity to experience the potential for multiple layers of meaning hidden in the archive. At the same time we are invited to explore some of the creative processes behind eight significant contemporary art practices.

Stephen Andrews interweaves film sequences from news stories central to recent history – images from the 1960s of the Kennedy assassination and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc outside the Cambodian embassy in Saigon, and passages of his own creation in a conceptual “reading” of the Black Star Collection. Through his alchemy of images and of memory, Andrews’ work entitled Dramatis Personae questions the assumptions of photojournalism and cinéma vérité, seeing cinema as a forensic tool.

Christina Battle’s multi-media project, entitled Archived Disasters, examines photographs of disastrous events across several decades of press imagery. Spilling over the confines of the archive and introducing interpretations resulting from her careful study of news stories published in response to the disasters, including those from the ever-popular “yellow press,” she takes us into the uncanny realm of science fiction.

Marie-Hélène Cousineau constructs an installation, entitled Perdre et retrouver le Nord inspired by portraits and snapshots found in the Black Star Collection, which were taken in Baker Lake during the 1960s. Bringing copies of these images with her to the North, she met with the Inuit who had been photographed. Responding to her own experience of living in Igloolik, Nunavut, she also worked with Susan Avingaq and other friends to evoke Northern history and landscapes. Through recounted stories and pictures we glimpse fragments of a world of which we know too little.

Stan Douglas himself writes that the Midcentury Studio project “chronicles the career of a photographer who was introduced to his craft during the war and tried to make it into a business in the postwar period” (1945-1951). Douglas’ photographs in this series are inspired by his meticulous study of the photographers who worked for Life magazine and the Black Star Agency, as well as the obscure Vancouver figure Raymond Munro. The photographs in Archival Dialogues were chosen for their sophisticated relationship to a look that would ultimately be eclipsed in photojournalism, and for their connection to the Black Star Collection in particular.

Vera Frenkel’s video-photo-text installation, The Blue Train, centers on a key phase of the journey of escape taken by the artist’s mother at the outbreak of World War II via a combination of stills, drawings and video that trace the journey through the minds of passengers with whom the experience was shared. The narrative of escape is interwoven with the witnessing narrative of photojournalist Werner Wolff on his 1945 return to Germany. The intimate words and thoughts of the passengers will also be accessible for portable devices over the internet. The Blue Train distills the stress and anxiety of forced migration and the courage of the documentary photographers who captured the experience.

Vid Ingelevics’ Conditional Report examines the contradictions inherent in the archiving process that the Black Star Collection at Ryerson University is subject to. Conditional Report focuses on the preservation and recording of “original” photographic images by digital scanning versus the destruction of exhibition images produced through that scanning process. Video of these acts is set within a simulation of the temporary storage facility of the collection, complete with the sounds of scanners and air-handling units regulating the environment.

David Rokeby’s installation, Shrouded, presented on the Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall in the gallery’s entrance colonnade, reconstructs the way the fovea (the small central part of the eye which can see detail) passes over the image like a searchlight cutting through a murk of blurry forms, selectively revealing details in Black Star images, sometimes along trajectories determined by the artist, and at other times determined by gestures of the viewer. By separating the mechanism of seeing from the habit of seeing, the artist reframes the process of grasping the image.

Michael Snow’s new installation TAUT utilizes some of the extraordinary Black Star Collection crowd photographs, including demonstrations, rallies, riots and confrontations, in a video projected on classroom chairs, desks and green board covered in white paper. The setting thus becomes a three-dimensional white screen for the twodimensional images of three-dimensional events and places.

Peggy Gale is an independent curator and writer whose texts on contemporary art, especially video art, have become artistic benchmarks. Born in Guyana in 1944, Gale studied at the University of Toronto and the Università degli Studi in Florence. She has published extensively, with essays in Video By Artists (1976, 1986), Mirror Machine: Video and Identity (1995) and Lectures obliques (1999), and texts in many museum catalogues. She was editor, among others, of Museums by Artists (with AA Bronson, 1983) and Video re/View: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artistsʼ Video (with Lisa Steele, 1996). Videotexts, a selection of her essays, was published in 1995. She has organized many exhibitions including: Videoscape (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974-1975); XIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1977); Electronic Landscapes (National Gallery of Canada, 1989); the Biennale of the Moving Image (Madrid, 1990) and Tout le temps / Every Time (La Biennale de Montréal, 2000). Peggy Gale lives in Toronto.

Doina Popescu is the inaugural Director of the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC). She oversees its academic, administrative, exhibition and outreach functions, and is responsible for maintaining its national and international profile. She is engaged in developing and executing a vision for the new Centre that addresses its three major interrelated areas of activity: exhibitions, research and collections. Each of these areas is being developed to interact with the multidisciplinary academic communities across campus, to dialogue with the arts in Toronto and across the country, as well as to engage in international partnerships. After bringing Edward Burtynsky: OIL and Berenice Abbott: Photographs to Toronto, she has co-curated the RIC’s launch exhibition entitled Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection.

Popescu was previously the Deputy Director of the Goethe-Institut Toronto, where she managed the Gallery and Kinowelt Hall, organising international photography, video and new media-based exhibitions and film events. For more than 25 years she has been deeply involved with both Canadian and international artists and scholars in the visual arts, film, literature, music, cultural theory, history and philosophy. She is a co-founder of the European Union Film Festival and the International Experimental Film/Media Congress. She has served on multiple juries, has spearheaded numerous publications and has guest curated arts programs for galleries and international festivals in Canada and abroad.

This exhibition is made possible with generous funding from:
Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Goethe-Institut, the Paul J. Ruhnke Memorial Fund, and The Howard and Carole Tanenbaum Charitable Foundation Fund.

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The Art of the Archive
Ryerson Students and Alumni
University Gallery

The exhibition The Art of the Archive is built on the reoccurring and popular theme of photographic and video archives and is divided into three parts: uses of the archive, representation of the archive and aesthetics of the archive.

The works of the "archival artists" (Hal Foster) gathered for this occasion combine two temporalities, the past and present, through reinterpretation and creative experience. The projects cover topics as diverse as the concepts of genealogy and family experiences, the evocation of childhood, the political history of the United States and the architectural standards of archival repositories. The appropriation of old objects and images, the representation of spaces devoted to these objects, or the playing with visual forms specific to the archive seem to respond to what Jacques Derrida called the "archive fever," an irrepressible desire to create a collective memory.

The works in this exhibition come from current students and recent alumni from the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University.

This exhibition is curated by Dr Gaëlle Morel, Curator at the Ryerson Image Centre. Morel received her PhD in the history of contemporary art from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, and she is a member of the editorial committee of the bilingual refereed journal Études photographiques. Morel was the guest curator of the Mois de la Photo in Montreal in 2009 and she has written essays that have appeared in a number of books and catalogues.

Image: Will McBride, West Berlin ('Crowd watches leaflets fall over square in front of the city hall. Willie Brandt spoke'), Germany, 1960s. Black Star Publishing Co. Inc.

Grand Opening
Scotiabank Nuit Blanche
Saturday, September 29, 7pm
Sunday, September 30, 7am

Ryerson Image Centre
33 Gould Street, Toronto Ontario
Admission free

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