With support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, Gallery 44 renovated its space and will reopen to the public on Friday September 13, 2013, 6 – 8 p.m. with the first opening reception of the 2013-14 season.
Matt Macintosh, Subject 21, Icon Device, inkjet print, 2012; Susan Dobson, Simulcast, video still, 2012
Peopled by the Unknown / Susan Dobson and Matt Macintosh
ARTIST TALK WILL BEGIN AT 6:30 p.m.
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West Suite #120
This exhibition pairs Susan Dobson’s 2012 video work Simulcast, with Icon Device a new series of photographs by Matt Macintosh. Each artist uses WWII era archival materials to create layered conceptual pieces. At the (unseen) margins of both artists’ works is a subject peopled by the unknown.
Simulcast
“The video Simulcast was inspired by a lecture I heard in Mexico City in 2005. Anthony Bannon, Director of George Eastman House, discussed photographic history and its evolution into digital and time-based media. He likened the uncertainty of what might come next for the medium to driving in a car late at night, with the headlights illuminating only a tiny strip of pavement at a time. The video footage, produced seven years later, was captured through the windshield of a moving car on paved and unpaved roads late at night. The only illumination comes from the car’s headlights and the occasional farmhouse and passing car. The visual is primarily black and white, and the camera remains stationary so that the windshield operates as a framing device. The audio component is an edited and condensed version of Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio broadcast War of the Worlds, a dramatization of H.G. Wells’ novel in which aliens invade earth….The loud digitized and disembodied voice of a GPS device, however, interrupts repeatedly, jolting the viewer back to the present. The two audio tracks refer to both past and present, questioning the veracity or absolute certainty of any information or technology. ” Susan Dobson
Icon Device
“This set of images takes away the object of people’s work to reveal the type of attention we give to objects. In the case of posed documentary photographs of women producing medicine and munitions during WWII, it is the same attention that is appropriated by propagandistic and religious imagery. I am interested in the liberating value of images that show “rapture” that is aware it is being watched.” Matt Macintosh
The show is open: September 13 – October 12, 2013, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography at 401 Richmond Street West Suite #120. Gallery hours: Tues – Sat, 11 – 5 p.m.