Past
Exhibitions
PROJECTIONS
April
8- June 17, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday April 8, 1-6 pm
A survey
of projection-based works in the history of contemporary art in Canada,
1964-2007.
David Askevold,
Rebecca Belmore, Genivieve Cadieux, Janet Cardiff & George Bures
Miller, Ian Carr-Harris, Christine Davis, Stan Douglas, Murray Favro,
Wyn Geleynse, Rodney Graham, David Hoffos, Nestor Krüger, Mark
Lewis, Kelly Mark, John Massey, Nathalie Melikian, Judy Radul, Gar Smith,
Michael Snow, Jana Sterbak, Robert Wiens, Krzysztof Wodiczko.
‘Projections’
is a major survey of projection-based works in the history of contemporary
art in Canada from the mid-1960s to the present. Curated by Barbara
Fischer and organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House),
the exhibition is co-produced and presented by the four major galleries
of the University of Toronto–Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga campus),
the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Scarborough campus), and the University
of Toronto Art Center and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery located on the
downtown campus.
The exhibition brings together
for the first time the particularly rich area of experimentation with
slide, film, and video projection that characterizes over four decades
of contemporary art in Canada. For most of the artists presented in
the exhibition, projection has been a major aspect and a defining concern
over many years, such as for Michael Snow and Murray Favro; it may even
constitute an artist’s entire practice, such as for Stan Douglas
or David Hoffos. In other instances, projection is part of a larger
body of work in diverse media ranging from sculpture to sound and photography,
such as it is for Geneviève Cadieux, Janet Cardiff & George
Bures Miller, Jana Sterbak, Rebecca Belmore, and Robert Wiens, among
others. Some of the works presented in this exhibition are internationally
recognized as seminal in the history of contemporary art, and most will
be shown in Toronto for the first time, including works by David Askevold,
Ian Carr-Harris, Nestor Krüger, Jana Sterbak, and newly commissioned
works by Nathalie Melikian and Kelly Mark. Together these works encapsulate
a history that exemplifies and provides insight into why projection
has become such an important and prevalent medium.
In this exhibition,
projection is both a medium and a subject. Realized in the form of sculpture,
slide-dissolves, 16mm film, and video, the works exploit both the experiential
and the metaphoric potential of projection as an analog for seeing,
imagining, dreaming, and knowing. Some works underplay and others exceed
the synchronized, integrated, or immersive effects of the most dominant
manifestation of projection in contemporary culture: cinema. If cinema
haunts the exhibition, its powers are suspended and its effects disentangled.
Instead of presenting a strict chronology, the exhibition focuses attention
on particular cinematic forms as they are taken apart to emphasize
the conceptual implications of their components, which are reflected
in the structure of the exhibition. At the University of Toronto Art
Centre, some works focus our attention exclusively on the experience
of light, reflection, and illumination. Others point to the paradoxical
nature of the screen, where a text or image is cast to show the colouring
or shaping of a variously receptive and resistant surface that takes
part in constructing perception. Works presented at the Justina M. Barnicke
Gallery more explicitly inhabit the forms of cinema. They newly engage
and playfully dissociate the relationships between voice and image,
the camera’s eye and the viewer’s body, and the construction
of cinematic spectacle. Finally, works presented at the Blackwood Gallery
and the Doris McCarthy Gallery share the projection of travels and journeys
into recorded and therefore virtual space, while irreverently undermining
the illusions and utopian dimensions of this projected place.
In earlier works
the emphasis is on isolating and parsing specific experiential effects,
whereas in more recent works a flowering of new cinematic and spatial
reconfigurations demonstrates our entanglement in mediation. In all
cases, however, the interest of the artists is in the way projection
allows us to look at how the world is seen—however distorted,
strangely re-cognized, or poignantly observed. Projection in contemporary
art in Canada serves less as a means to tell a story than as a means
of thinking through ideas about seeing and knowing, and of experimenting
with the conceptual, psychological, and political dimensions of the
relationship between the two—which is where the history of
this work joins the analyses of mediation that have themselves been
a powerful force in the intellectual legacy in this country.
Curated by Barbara
Fischer, organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House.
This project has
been made possible in part through contributions by the Canada Council
for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, Manulife
Financial, Charles Street Video, and the Museums Assistance Program,
Department of Canadian Heritage.
Installation Views:
Projections @ the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Blackwood Gallery, and the University of Toronto Art Centre, 2007
