[Fall 2016]
With great sensitivity and remarkable image quality, the works brought together in this section offer a renewed gaze at discredited realities and experiences. They do this by showing us people in their living environments. And yet, it is not individuals that these works offer as much as a certain order of representation, certain priorities, a certain way of seeing things that encourages us to reevaluate them.
Yoanis Menge, HAKAPIK
Yoanis Menge wants to change negative perceptions of the seal hunt on Îles de la Madeleine. He becomes a hunter himself in order to capture images of this way of life: close-up portraits, imposing panoramas, and intense blacks and whites that immerse us in the heart of an activity with its own vitality.
With an essay by Mona Hakim
Outsiders: American Photography and Film 1950s–1980s
Recently, the Ontario Art Gallery presented an exhibition of American postwar photographic (and film) practices that looked at marginalized “subjects” and ways of life. At the time, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Nan Golden, and several others overturned the conventions of representation and transform culture.
With an essay by Jill Glessing
Marisa Portolose, Belle de jour III
With her “Belles de jour,” Marisa Portolese explores the issues in representation of women by playing on stereotypes and offering images of a tranquil self-affirmation formed of interiority and sensuality. The last iteration of her series, based on a rereading of William Notman’s work, peels away the conventions of portraits of women in the Victorian era.
With an essay by James D. Campbell