CONTACT 2010 Portfolio Reviews Award Exhibition
Toronto Image Works Gallery, February 23 – March 24, 2012
Opening reception Thursday February 23, 5 – 8pm

Alex Kisilevich's practice investigates the duality of photography, with its capability to imply truth while simultaneously subverting it. His new photographs employ aspects of sculpture, installation and performance to touch on ideas of distinction and assimilation. The images, full of pathos and absurdity, continue to explore human subjectivity as well as the relationships we form with the things around us.

Alex Kisilevich is a photo-based artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. He is a recent graduate of the MFA program in Visual Arts at York University and holds BFAs in Music and Photography from York University and OCAD University, respectively. Kisilevich's photographs have been featured in publications such as Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward and BlackFlash Magazine. His work has been exhibited internationally and was recently shown in a solo exhibition during the Lianzhou Photography Festival 2011 in China. Kisilevich is represented by Angell Gallery in Canada.

Toronto Image Works Gallery
80 Spadina Avenue
Suite 207 Toronto
Ontario M5V 2J4
www.torontoimageworks.com

Exhibition Hours:
Monday - Friday 8:30am - 7pm
Saturday 11am - 3pm
 

CONTACT 2011 Portfolio Reviews Award Exhibition
The CONTACT Gallery January 19 – February 16, 2012
Opening Thursday January 19, 6- 9PM

The reserves of the In-SHUCK-ch Nation are scattered along both sides of British Columbia’s Lillooet River in an expanse of traditional territory stretching 100km north and south between the towns of Pemberton and Harrison Lake. Like many of Canada’s indigenous communities, these settlements exist in isolation; poverty is rampant and infrastructure dearly lacking, and with limited access to health and education resources, the communities of the Lillooet River Valley can be seen to represent a continuation of what has too often been referred to as the “Indian Problem.” This series illustrates Taggart’s ongoing commitment to document and raise awareness of the socio-economic challenges facing Canada’s First Nations communities.

Jonathan Taggart is a photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a founding member of the Boreal Collective of Canadian photojournalists. His photography has been exhibited internationally, has been featured in the New York Times Lens Blog and Applied Arts Magazine, among others. He was nominated for the National Magazine Award (Photojournalism, 2010) and PDN30 (2012), and is a three time Ontario Arts Council grant receipt. Taggart spends his volunteer time as a photography instructor at Vancouver’s Urban Native Youth Association.
 

CONTACT Gallery
80 Spadina Avenue
Suite 310 Toronto
Ontario M5V 2J4

Exhibition Hours:
Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 11am - 5pm

 

CONTACT 2011 Portfolio Reviews Award Exhibition
Toronto Image Works Gallery January 19 – February 16, 2012
Opening Thursday January 19, 6- 9PM

Jesse Louttit’s new series documents Moosonee and Moose Factory, two northern Ontario towns unconnected to the road system and only accessible by train or plane. Located on the shores of the Moose River and James Bay, they are at the northernmost point of the Ontario Northlander train route. Originally settled as fur trading posts, the towns grew in prominence with the arrival of the rail line in 1932 operating as gateways to surrounding communities, many of them Cree settlements. Louttit’s return to Moosonee, the place where his father was born, was inspired by his fascination with isolation, connection and travel in remote places. Unable to locate the areas on Google Street View, these large format images are personal substitutes, responding to the global mapping project with an insightful approach. Taken at dusk and before dawn, Louttit’s use of light and composition evoke qualities of beauty, stillness, and contemplation, while depicting the infrastructural elements of these isolated towns.

Jesse Louttit is a photographer who lives and works in Toronto. His large format landscape images often reveal the traces of human existance in the environment. His work has been featured in PDN, Applied Arts and Report on Business and has been exhibited at Pikto and the Boiler House for CONTACT 2011. The Harbourfront Centre will be presenting a series of No Roads in the Photo Gallery from January 28 to April 15, 2012. 
Opening Friday January 27, 6 - 8pm.

Toronto Image Works Gallery
80 Spadina Avenue
Suite 207 Toronto
Ontario M5V 2J4
www.torontoimageworks.com

Exhibition Hours:
Monday - Friday 8:30am - 7pm
Saturday 11am - 3pm
 

November 5 - December 3, 2011
Opening Reception Saturday November 5, 2 - 5pm
CONTACT Gallery

Kate Armstrong
Myfanwy Ashmore
Jeremy Bailey
David Jhave Johnston
Mouchette
Rafaël Rozendaal
Cheryl Sourkes
Donna Szoke
KD Thornton

"All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical"
- The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan, p 26

Medium_Massage 2.0 :: an infinite inventory is a net-based exhibition inspired by Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore's collaborative book The Medium is the Massage. Published in 1967 in an experimental format that fused Fiore's engaging graphic style and visual language with McLuhan's text, The Medium is the Massage introduced McLuhan's theories of media and communications technology to a mass audience. Within the context of Marshall McLuhan's centennial and 20 years after the development of the first webpage, the media artists in this exhibition reflect McLuhan's prophetic theories through their immersion in the networked medium and cultural shift that McLuhan predicted in the 60s.

The exhibition includes a new expanded version of The Medium is the Massage matched with compositionally similar images using google algorithms; a sorrybot that gives a unique apology to every citizen on earth; new web software that re-invents the way artists communicate with the media; an archeological examination of 8 bit-graphic images and obsolescent media through daily floppy disc mining; and more!

Curated by Michael Alstad. Presented by Year Zero One (YZO) in collaboration with the CONTACT Gallery for the McLuhan100 Festival.

YZO gratefully acknowledges the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support of Medium_Massage 2.0.

www.year01.com/mediummassage
www.mcluhan100.ca

Exhibition Hours:
Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 11am - 5pm

CONTACT Gallery
80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 310
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2J4

September 8 - October 22, 2011
CONTACT Gallery

Presented in collaboration with the Toronto International Film Festival Future Projections Programme

With La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini broke with the neorealist tradition of filming on location, and moved to Cinecittà Studios, where he built a near-exact replica of Rome's famed Via Veneto. Cinecittà, then known for hosting American epics like Ben Hur, would become inextricably linked with the great director.

In this series of photographs, artist Gregory Crewdson revisits Fellini's stomping grounds, documenting a cinematic ruin where narratives linger like ghosts. The traces of bygone productions are everywhere: a painted sign, perhaps from Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York; flooded alleyways that evoke HBO's Rome.

Crewdson—known for highly staged, fantastic photographs—chooses to dwell on the gaps in the fragile illusions of these film sets. Scaffolding can be seen supporting each structure. Modern high rises can be glimpsed behind an ancient cottage.

Mussolini once described Cinecittà as the place where "dreams become reality." For Crewdson—like Fellini before him—it is a place to revel in the dreamlike nature of reality itself. — Michael Connor, Exhibition Curator

Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962, lives and works in New York) is internationally renowned for his elaborately constructed, surreal scenes of small town America. His large-scale colour photographs psychologically reference the movies by iconic filmmakers such as David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stephen Spielberg. Museum and public collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the V&A Museum, London. A retrospective of his work, spanning his career, from 1985 - 2005, was shown as a traveling exhibition from 2005 - 2008, at major museums in Europe. Another travelling exhibition of his work opened at the Kulturhuset Museum, Stockholm, in February 2011, followed by Sorte Diamant, Copenhagen and c/o Berlin, Berlin.

Note special hours for this exhibition:
Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm, Saturday 11am - 5pm
Sunday September 11 & 18 only 12 - 5pm

CONTACT Gallery
80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 310
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2J4