Drawn by Light: Collecting Photography

January 31 to April 20, 2008

The exhibition, Drawn by Light: Collecting Photography, featured works selected from the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre’s collection of contemporary photography, including many that were on public view for the first time. It was an opportunity to reveal important bodies of work that have been acquired for the permanent collection through purchases and donations, and offered a counterpoint to the concurrent exhibition Spectacle + Artifice.

Drawn by Light focused on traditional documentary approaches (such as the photo essay) and pre-digital techniques (such as photo-montage, collage or gum bichromate), in contrast to the highly directorial photo-based works featured in Spectacle + Artifice. These exhibitions ignited the debate between objectivity/subjectivity in the photographic image.

Andrea Modica (Manitou Springs, Colorado) celebrated the diversity of Native American peoples and challenges assumptions about their cultures in her photo-essay titled Real Indians, 2002 (a commission by the American Indian College Fund to photograph the people closely associated with the 32 tribal colleges for Native Americans in 12 western states). Twenty-five of Modica’s silver prints were featured in Drawn by Light.

The exhibition included nine large silver print portraits of Inuit artists created by John Reeves (Toronto), a leading documentarian of Canada’s Arctic Inuit communities. Reeves created these photographs on visits to nine distinct Inuit communities between 1968 and 1998: Arctic Bay, Baker Lake, Cape Dorset, Chesterfield Inlet, Eskimo Point, Igloolik, Keewatin, Pelly Bay and Repulse Bay.

Ten silver prints selected from The Boxing Portfolio (1989-1996) by Larry Fink (New York), revealed the gritty reality of a sport consumed as entertainment. A practitioner of the ‘snapshot aesthetic,’ Fink uses the flash to terrific expressive potential, a technique that epitomizes, even values, the imperfect photograph. Ring Girls, Madison Square Garden, NY, May 1996 (pictured) acknowledges the archaic tradition of scantily-clad showgirls who announce each round during a fight. Fink’s close proximity to his subject results in the awkward elongation of her legs, a gross distortion that underscores the brutish reality of the sport.

Three gum bichromate prints by Stephen Livick (London, Ontario) from his Middle America series employ visual literalism: pointed snapshots of middle class society. The complexity of Livick’s medium stands in contrast to his subjects, who are photographed at home and in their local environments. Pre-digital photographic manipulation is explored in the collages of Sylvie Belanger and Christine Davis, and in the photo-montages of Brian Scott. Belanger and Davis question our understanding of identity and representation, whereas

Scott’s work references the surreal and deals with culturally-coded aspects of perception. John Massey combines conventional photography with digital manipulation, as exemplified by two photo-serigraphs, and Lori Newdick takes an unfettered approach to figurative colour photography in a vertical triptych. (Belanger, Davis, Scott, Massey and Newdick live and work in Toronto.)

Drawn by Light: Collecting Photography was curated by Dawn Owen.

Image:
Larry Fink, Ring Girls, Madison Square Garden, NY, May 1996 (from The Boxing Portfolio, 1989 to 1996)
(silver print photograph on multi-grade fibre-based paper, edition 13/25)
Gift of Avrum Glasner, 2005, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection

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