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18/6/2013

Five exhibitions

Ryerson Image Centre RIC, Toronto

Gabor Szilasi
The Eloquence of the Everyday

Curated by David Harris


“Everything is constantly changing around us: what my camera captures at this moment is already of the past. That is why it is important to me to record the world as I see it today through photography. I am not interested in the past or the future: I am interested in the present. Through the photographic image, I can directly record the signs of the past and the future as they appear in this moment.” 
- Gabor Szilasi, 1977

Gabor Szilasi was twenty-nine years old in 1957 when he and his father arrived in Halifax as immigrants fleeing Hungary. Two years later, he settled in Montreal, where he has lived ever since.

Szilasi had developed an interest in European pictorialist photography while still living in Budapest, but from the time of his arrival in Quebec, his work has been sustained by an unwavering belief in the documentary value of the medium. In keeping with documentary practices, his concern centres on the subject of the photograph and its clear presentation and elucidation. Szilasi’s viewpoint remains that of an outsider, one whose European perspective and sensibility have allowed him to temper formality with sympathy and to produce compelling photographs that embody a sense of profound compassion.

Szilasi has created remarkable images of Quebec and Europe – townscapes and cityscapes, architectural views, and environmental portraits, a genre in which the setting plays a prominent role. The cultural and historical value of the work rests not only in the eloquence of the individual images, but also in the cumulative record they provide.

This exhibition presents the photography of Gabor Szilasi, describing its evolution over five decades through an examination of the work carried out in three locations: Hungary, rural Quebec, and Montreal. Within each section, architectural, and town and city views mingle with portraits in order to reveal Szilasi’s belief in the centrality of community. The exhibition includes early images of Hungary in the 1950s, as well as those made since 1980. The photographs of rural Quebec date principally from the 1970s, while those of Montreal span the years from the late 1950s to the present.

David Harris is the guest curator of the exhibition Gabor Szilasi: The Eloquence of the Everyday, and is the author of the accompanying catalogue (National Gallery of Canada, 2009).

Harris has a Master of Arts in Art History, from the University of New Mexico (1991). From 1989-1996, he was Associate Curator of Photographs at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Between 1996 and 2004, he worked as an independent curator and photographic historian, specializing in nineteenth-century and contemporary architectural and landscape photography. In 1999 he began teaching at the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University, and was appointed Assistant Professor in 2004 and Associate Professor in 2008.

In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Eugène Atget: Unknown Paris (2003; an English edition of Itinéraires Parisiens, 1999), Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato's Photographs of China in 1860 (1999), Gabor Szilasi: Photographs, 1954-1996 (1997), and Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880 (1993). He is currently engaged in a study of use and history of the photographic contact sheet.

Organized by the Musée d’art de Joliette and the National Gallery of Canada.

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Arthur S. Goss
Works and Days

During his long tenure as Toronto’s official photographer (1911-1940), Arthur S. Goss created thousands of images that illustrate in fine detail the Victorian city’s ambitious, but often difficult, re-invention of itself as a modern Canadian metropolis. He has long been best known for his eloquent pictures of slums, destitute immigrants, and other dark elements of this historical passage. This exhibition, presented in collaboration with the City of Toronto Archives, aims to reveal a less widely heralded aspect of Goss’s professional work, but one that occupied his time and creative energy more fully than any other: the routinized production of visual documents for the use of various city departments and agencies.

Early in the fashioning of this display, our curiosity was aroused by these images, which have so far been largely unfamiliar to the public. We became interested in what they can tell us about the practice of a photographer embedded in, and beholden to, an urban bureaucracy early in the twentieth century. This practice, the images suggest, was informed by the instrumental and disinterested rationality expected of employees in the public institutions created by political and social modernity.

His self-effacing and matter-of-fact approach suggests to the viewer that what is visible to the naked eye is all that there is to see. However, this literalness actually obscures the invisible but pervasive presence of an institutional authority directing these photographs. By featuring and deliberately highlighting Goss’s quotidian, prosaic output, in contrast to his more humanistic imagery of unfortunate city-dwellers, we hope to encourage a fresh appraisal of civic photography, its urgencies and ideologies, in Toronto early in the last century, and a rethinking of bureaucratic image-making everywhere.

Guest Curators:

Blake Fitzpatrick PhD, is a professor and the graduate program director of the Documentary Media (MFA) program at Ryerson University. An active photographer, curator, and writer, his research interests include the photographic representation of the nuclear era, visual responses to contemporary militarism, and the post-Cold War mobility of the Berlin Wall. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the United States and his recent curatorial initiatives include War at a Distance, Disaster Topographics, and The Atomic Photographers Guild: Visibility and Invisibility in the Nuclear Era. His writing and visual work have appeared in Ciel Variable, Public, Topia, History of Photography, and FUSE.

John Bentley Mays is an award-winning Toronto writer on contemporary architecture and visual art, and the author of several books. He was the art critic for The Globe and Mail for almost two decades, and has also been the cultural correspondent at large for the National Post. He is currently an architecture critic for The Globe and Mail. His essays and reviews have appeared in Azure, Canadian Architect, Canadian Art, International Architecture and Design, Ciel Variable, and other cultural journals. Mays’ several prizes for writing include the National Newspaper Award for criticism, the Ontario Historical Society’s Joseph Brant award, and the National Magazine Award Foundation’s President’s Medal, Canada’s highest award for magazine journalism. Of Mays’ books, two have been national best-sellers: In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memoir of Depression and Power in the Blood: Land, Memory, and a Southern Family.

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Here and There
Photography and Video Works on Immigration

Spanning from the 1950s with photographs from the Black Star collection to today with photographic, new media and video works by contemporary Canadian artists, this exhibition on the theme of immigration will be the first group show featured on the Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall.

The different works deal with issues such as voluntary and hopeful immigration to Canada in the 1950s, refugee shelters in the United States and Canada today, and first generation of immigrants now settled in Canada.

On view on the Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall, May 1 – June 2, June 19 – August 25, 2013

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.

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From the Archive

June 19 – August 25, 2013
Selection by Howard Tanenbaum, Founding Chair of the RIC Advisory Board
Great Hall

From the Archive is a series in which guest curators are invited to select photographs from the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) Collection to be displayed in vitrines located in the Great Hall of the Gallery. RIC Director, Doina Popescu, explains that From the Archive “opens up the collection in exciting new ways to colleagues and friends of the Ryerson Image Centre, allowing them to participate directly in the activities of the Centre and to share their personal selections and points of view with our visitors.”

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Ken Woroner
Hardscrabble
June 19 – July 14, 2013
Student Gallery

Now known as Golden Valley, Hardscrabble was the name European settlers first gave to the small northern Ontario community upon their arrival in the 1870s. These two names neatly bracket the combination of struggle and promise present in this rural location and its starkly beautiful, economically challenging terrain. Straddling a divide between subjective concerns and empathetic engagement, this series of photographs blends the personal with the documentary.

Image: Arthur S. Goss, Bloor Street Viaduct Photographs, General View – Railway Tracks, October 18, 1912. City of Toronto Archives, series 372, sub-series 10, item 48.

Press contacts:
Heather Kelly, Director of Marketing and Communications 416-364-5701 heatherkelly@ryerson.ca
Erin Warner 416-979-5000 x7032 erin.warner@ryerson.ca
Johanna VanderMaas Public Affairs Ryerson University 416-979-5000 x4630 Johanna.vandermaas@ryerson.ca

The public opening reception will take place Wednesday, June 19, 2013, 6:00p.m. - 8:00p.m.

Ryerson Image Centre
33 Gould Street Toronto, Ontario Canada
Opening:
Wednesday, June 19, 7pm
Admission is free

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