A maze of collapsing lines
As you are falling, your sense of orientation may start to play additional tricks on you. The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries.1
— Hito Steyerl
On the occasion of Gallery 44’s 40th Anniversary, we are proud to present A maze of collapsing lines, a hybrid online exhibition and publication. Comprised of five chapters, each will feature contemporary lens-based work by artists from different regions of Canada, and associated programming.
In bringing this project together, we have been thinking about and questioning our notion of networks: the proverbial geometries that bind us as practitioners, researchers, professionals, and advocates working in image and artist-run cultures. At the time of their inception, artist-run centers in Canada represented a network of radical and self-determined spaces – a national constellation of brick-and-mortar galleries and studios that existed for the purpose of furthering artistic practice, experimentation, education, discourse and presentation. Four decades later, our network identity is certainly less radical, but also perhaps, less clear.
However, we have come to this state of unknowing ourselves honestly. Aside from shifting administrative models and funding landscapes, in the present moment, notions of relational identity, belonging, and the ways we interact with and see one another have become increasingly slippery and unfixed. Analogous to this is artist, writer and thinker, Hito Steyerl’s unpacking of linear perspective. Now outdated and dysfunctional for “its stable and single point of view”2 she describes that this former mode of seeing has been supplanted by “multiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distorted flight lines, and divergent vanishing points.”3 In reaction to this sense of groundlessness, Steyerl proposes that we are falling, stating that:
falling does not only mean falling apart, it can also mean a new certainty falling into place. Grappling with crumbling futures that propel us backwards onto an agonizing present, we may realize that the place we are falling toward is no longer grounded, nor is it stable. It promises no community, but a shifting formation.4
Using Steyerl’s observations as a point of departure, this digital publication considers shifting notions of geographical and virtual spaces, perceived sensations of groundlessness, and how a gallery rooted in lens-based imagery can use the web to expand dialogues on contemporary image culture and artist-run platforms.
This project’s title conjures imagery of lines in a state of collapse, indicating multiple ways of moving and seeing. Our approach marks an intentional departure from the way we usually work in the gallery context – a departure from that which is spatially, temporally and logically linear. To navigate this, we have employed a horizontal aesthetic to counter the hierarchical ways of thinking that have been foundational to the colonial legacies of linear perspective, our relationship to the land, and the internet as a platform. Each chapter compliments this premise by scrolling horizontally in reference to lateral thinking, collaboration, and to espouse connections between that which is both geographically and conceptually disparate.
In the indeterminate space that many artist-run cultures inhabit, how can we leverage our networks to build conversations that are less reliant on singular, locative, physical containers? The digital nature of this publication allows us to extend our reach, regardless of situated geography, while accompanying site-specific programming puts multiple locations in conversation with one another. We hope this project will serve to expand the networks between artist-run centers and their communities while considering the productivity and equality of free fall.
— Sophia Oppel, Heather Rigg, Alana Traficante
1 Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 13.
2 Steyerl, “In Free Fall,” 14.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid, 28.
Acknowledgements
Heather Rigg is the Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Gallery 44, and is a co-founder of ma ma, a not-for-profit contemporary art space based in Toronto.
Sophia Oppel is the Curatorial Project Assistant at Gallery 44 and co-director at Bunker 2 Contemporary Art Container.
Alana Traficante is an art writer and curator and the Executive Director of Gallery 44.
Chapter 1 Contributors:
Tricia Livingston is an Indigenous artist currently located in northern British Columbia. She graduated from Concordia University with a BFA in Photography and Art History in 2014 and she works in video, installation, textiles, photography, and printed media. Her community work involves restorative justice, child protection, language revitalization, and most recently, moose hide tanning.
Chapter 2 Contributors:
Jem Baptiste is a Black multi-disciplinary emerging artist. With mediums spanning across found objects, digital collage, paper and oil paint, her work attempts to dismantle internal structures of art, anti-blackness and misogynoir. Focusing on concepts of identity, body and truth, she is inspired by the everyday existence of a Black woman.
Toronto based Oreka James is a multidisciplinary artist who uses storytelling as a means to explore the complexities surrounding the construction of Blackness. Her work intimately recalls people, places and stories exclusively from Black Wimmin identifying peoples that are overlooked, to reveal love, sexuality, mental health and healing.
Scarborough based Sylvia Limbana is a self-taught, interdisciplinary artist focused on the black identity. Her practice currently takes her through histories otherwise untold and actively forgotten. Limbana seeks to close the gap between continental Africans and Africans by way of displacement.
Filmon Yohannes is a diasporic Eritrean artist and storyteller using the practices of image-making as his medium. His work is heavily informed by themes of masculinity, blackness, coming-of-age, and his Eritrean identity.
Zoma is a digital artist and designer who works primarily with 3D modelling, game design and physical computing. Zoma is interested in making educational tools that address aspects of Black life globally.
Chapter 3 Contributors:
Eldred Allen is a photographer from Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, NL, who rigorously maps the world around him using a combination of hand-held, 360° photosphere cameras, drones, and 3D modelling. “Our Beautiful Land” (2019) marks the first time his works will appear in an arts exhibition.
Laisa Audlaluk-Watsko is a photographer from Ausuittuq (Grise Fiord), NU. Her subject matter varies from life on the land to documentary photographs of school council meetings and other aspects of modern life, but her photographs are always distinguished by their use of light. Audlaluk-Watsko was elected to her city council in 2014.
Mary Gordon is a photographer from Kuujuaq, Nunavik, QC, who has been taking photographs for over 40 years. Her unusual overhead vantage point manipulates viewers’ sense of scale and power over her subjects. Gordon is currently in the process of passing her photography skills down to her daughters.
Robert Kautuk is a photographer based in Kangiqtugaapik (Clyde River), NU. He captures stunning views of the Canadian Arctic and is particularly noted for his aerial scenes captured with the aid of a drone. Kautuk has appeared in many publications, including the Inuit Art Quarterly, Up Here,and above&beyond.
Britt Gallpen is a writer, curator and Editorial Director of Inuit Art Quarterly.
John Geoghegan is a writer, researcher and Senior Editor of Inuit Art Quarterly.
Taqralik Partridge is an artist, spoken word poet, writer and curator.
Chapter 4 Contributors:
Halie Finney is an emerging artist currently based in Edmonton, Alberta. She received her degree from the Alberta University of Art and Design in 2017 where she majored in drawing; she also graduated from MacEwan University in 2014 with a diploma in fine arts.
Born and raised in the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, Halie holds a strong connection to the area. She understands her Métis heritage through memories told to her by generations of her family who still reside there and through the unchanged characteristics of her home’s landscape and lifestyle. In order to speak about home and family freely Halie has created a mythology of characters living in a simplified storybook reflection of her hometown. The group of characters plays out non-linear, idiosyncratic narratives that are expressed through animations, costumes, drawings, paintings, performances and other objects.
Dwayne Martineau is a visual artist, musician and composer living in Edmonton. Two preoccupations dominate his work— the physicality of light, and experimental landscape photography. Using optics, found glass, mirrors and multiple exposures, Martineau introduces distortions, symmetries, and animism into exhaustive studies of forests and trees. His goal, as he describes it, is to use the unique power of photography to “give us a chance to see nature through a different lens, literally, and understand that it’s got its own thing going on…” Dwayne is a member of the Frog Lake First Nation, descended from a complex frontier mix of early French, Scottish and Irish settlers, Plains Cree, Métis, and Iroquois.
Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective supports the work of Indigenous contemporary artists and designers and engages in contemporary critical dialogue, valuing artistic collaboration and fostering awareness of Indigenous contemporary art practices.
In March 2020, Ociciwan will be opening a contemporary Indigenous arts centre in Edmonton, Alberta. The gallery will host 4 exhibitions a year dedicated to Indigenous contemporary art practices. The goal of the centre is to create a venue to present Indigenous contemporary art in Edmonton year round and to serve as a place for experimental creative practices and innovative research.
Chapter 5
Amalie Atkins lives and works in Saskatoon. As a multidisciplinary artist noted for her films and video installations she creates cinematic fables through a blend of film, performance, textiles, installations, and photography. Atkins has exhibited nationally including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Central Art Garage, Gallery 44, The Ottawa Art Gallery, Eastern Edge, Struts Gallery, La Centrale, FADO, Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine. Her work has shown internationally at Moving Image, NYC; 12:14 Contemporary, Vienna; USC Art Gallery Queensland; The Academy Gallery,Tasmania; Gerald Moore Gallery, UK; and Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin. Her work has been included in major survey exhibitions, most notably, Oh, Canada at the MASS MoCA; DreamLand: Textiles in the Canadian Landscape at the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto; and Road Show East, which toured in Eastern Europe. Atkins was the recipient of the Locale Art Award for western Canada (2011) and long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in (2012, 2013). Her photographs have appeared on the covers of Canadian Art Magazine, Visual Arts News, Grain Magazine, CV2, and MUZE magazine (Paris). Her solo exhibition we live on the edge of disaster and imagine we are in a musical toured to the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; and College Art Galleries, Saskatoon. Where the hour floats, was selected for Capture Photo Fest at Evergreen Art Gallery, Coquitlam (2019). Remai Modern premiered her most expansive 16 mm film project to date and was reviewed by Amy Fung in ARTFORUM. Currently her work is on view in Fairy Tales at the Owens Art Gallery, Sackville and in A New Light: Canadian Women Artists at the Embassy of Canada in Washington, DC.
Maggie Groat is a visual artist who utilizes a range of media including works on paper, sculpture, textiles, site-specific interventions and publications to interrogate methodologies of collage. Her research surrounds site-responsiveness with regard to shifting territories, alternative and decolonial ways-of-being, and the transformation of salvaged materials into utilitarian objects for speculation, vision and action. The approaches and perspectives demonstrated within her practice are informed by her Haudenosaunee and Settler ancestry, her roles as mother and environmental steward. Her work has been shown at many notable institutions across Canada, including The Western Front (Vancouver, BC), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, AB), Art Gallery of York University, Art Museum University of Toronto (Toronto ON), SBC (Montreal, QC), and has twice been long-listed for the Sobey Award (2015, 2018). She is the editor of The Lake (2014) published by Art Metropole (Toronto ON) and ALMANAC (2017) published by the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (Kitchener ON). She is currently a lecturer in the Visual Studies department at the University of Toronto and lives with her partner and three young children on the land between two lakes, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Chonnonton and Anishnaabeg.
Soda_Jerk is a two-person art collective who work exclusively with sampled material and pirated cinema to make experimental documentary films. Following their acclaimed political revenge fable TERROR NULLIUS (2018), Soda_Jerk are currently working on a new feature Hello Dankness. Formed in Sydney in 2002, they’ve been based in NYC since 2012. They have exhibited in galleries, cinemas and institutions including the Barbican Centre, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Hartware Medien KunstVerein, Dortmund, Wexner Centre for the Arts, Columbus; and Anthology Film Archives, New York.
Tarin Dehod was born on unceded Mi’kmaq land originally known as Epekwitk. She is a curator and arts administrator, living and working on Treaty Six Land that encompasses the traditional homeland of numerous First Nations, including Cree, Dene, Plains Cree, Nakota, Saulteaux, and Ojibwe, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. Since 2014, Tarin has served as the Executive Director of AKA, working to understand the role of the artist-run centre in joint ownership with communities, as a space that is created and given meaning through the actions of its users. Recent projects include: Tuesday Night (2019)—a talk show, a town hall, a Reddit thread—with Joel Bernbaum, Andreas Buchwaldt, and Lancelot Knight, co-curated with Derek Sandbeck; Locals Only (2017-2019) funded by the CCA’s New Chapter Initiative; Maya Stovall: Compulsion and Heart (2018).
Translation
Julie René De Cotret
Dorothy Thunder
Elizabeth Qulaut
Design
Tennis
Partners
Black Artists Union
Inuit Art Foundation
Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective
AKA Artist-Run Centre
OCAD University’s Career Launchers Program
Donors
The Baulmash Siegel Fund
Patricia McVitty
Stephen Bulger
Alexandra Majerus
Sandi Ralph
Jordan Nahmias
F. Leslie Thompson
Robyn York / Anchorless Press
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond St W.
Suite 120 Toronto, ON, Canada
M5V 3A8
416.979.3941
gallery44.org
Registered Charity #11924 7310 RR0001
Staff
Executive Director
Alana Traficante
Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs
Heather Rigg
Curator of Education and Community Outreach
Leila Fatemi
Head of Communications and Development
Maegan Broadhurst
Interim Head of Membership and Facilities
Fehn Foss
Curatorial Project Assistant
Sophia Oppel
Board of Directors
Kendra Ainsworth
Sarah Bodri
Kotoma Bouabane
Katie Chasowy
Alexandra Majerus
Jihee Min
Jordan Nahmias
Brian St. Denis
Shellie Zang
Gallery 44 acknowledges that it is situated on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of the land on which we stand and create.