the cartographer’s mistake: Southall and other places

Posted on by
Sarindar Dhaliwal
A Space Gallery (MAIN GALLERY)
Exhibition runs January 18 2013 – February 23 2013
Reception: January 18 2013: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Essay by: Michelle Jacques
Copresented by: A Space Gallery, LIFT
Location:
A Space Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 110
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada
Tuesday to Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday 12pm – 5pm
 
The title of Sarindar Dhaliwal’s solo exhibition identifies one very specific location – Southall, the suburban district of London, England, to which her family immigrated in the 1950s – and an indeterminate number of unnamed ones – the “other places.” These undisclosed sites likely include India, or more precisely, the Punjab, where the artist was born, and Canada, where, as a teenager, she moved with her family. Dhaliwal’s work, produced over the course of a career that has spanned more than three decades, also typically spans, to some extent or other, the three countries that she has called home. While Dhaliwal has employed many mediums in her œuvre, amongst them painting, photography, installation, printmaking and video, her work is unified in its consideration of identity, migration and Diaspora, and by its use of narrative strategies and autobiographical content. Ultimately these stories take her – and us – far away from that time and place in Southall, to the many other places, real and imagined, that ultimately determine who we are. Continue reading →

Cylla von Tiedemann : What Dances in Between

Posted on by

Cylla von Tiedemann : What Dances in Between

January 10, 2013 – February 9, 2013
Reception: January 10, 2013, 6-8 PM

Cylla von Tiedemann, international photographer of the performing arts, not only witnesses but captures fleeting moments in time and space, those interstices of movement and drama, where revelation lies. The exhibit highlights this encounter in the artist's dance photography, which includes new work, black and white archival silver prints, and portraits of dancers from The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, the organization chosen to receive a portion of sale proceeds.

www.cylla.ca www.schooloftdt.org

THE AL GREEN GALLERY
64 Merton Street Toronto ON M4S 1A1
Wed. Fri. Sat. 12-5, Thurs. 12-7 During Exhibitions
T 416-440-3084 director@thealgreengallery.com
www.thealgreengallery.com

pic

Deanna Bowen: Invisible Empires

Posted on by

pic

I had crossed the line, I was free but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. – Harriet Tubman

16 January – 17 March 2013

Opening Reception:
Wednesday, January 16, 6 – 9 pm

Deanna Bowen: Invisible Empires is a bold exhibition that presents a view on the Ku Klux Klan both during the American Civil Rights Movement era and its century-long history in Canada. Yes, in Canada. This radical new project stems from Toronto artist Deanna Bowen’s inquiry into her own ancestry of Black pioneers who emigrated from Oklahoma to northern Alberta in the early twentieth century, a crossing mirrored by the Klan themselves. Her autobiographical approach and archival investigations, though, deviate in this exhibition. Documents no longer serve the purpose of memorializing a traumatic past experience by means of an empathetic act of witnessing in the present, working through the traumatic archives of memory. Instead Bowen “crosses the line” into enemy territory by working with an “archive” of Klan material. “Working through” takes on a whole new dimension when the archives that supposedly are memorialized are those of the KKK, and when these documents and scenarios are re-enacted in the present for us to witness, and re-live. Laying it on the line, she in fact creates the KKK’s archive, memorializing it to another purpose and implicating us as spectators. In this endeavor, she, furthermore, “crosses the line” in what is expected or “permitted” of a Black artist by, in effect, reversing her area of concern from Black Studies to White Studies. This pioneering new work painfully breaks open the polarizing positions of racist ideologies embedded in the Klan’s history, as well as the discourses that evolve out of them by placing us squarely at the centre of the debate today: a line to be crossed or a line to be drawn?

The exhibition opens on Wednesday January 16, 6–9 pm with a commissioned performance re-creation of a twenty-minute October 24, 1965, CBC television interview between Calvin Craig, Grand Dragon of the Georgia Realm of the United Klans of America and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; his fellow Klansman George Sleigh; Civil Rights activist Reverend James Bevel; and This Hour Has Seven Days host Robert Hoyt. The exhibition continues through to Sunday, March 17, 2013. Continue reading →