“Walrus Hunt” by Robert Kautuk (2016 ). (Art Gallery of Ontario)
The Art Gallery of Ontario’s brand-new exhibit We Are Story: The Canada Now Photography Acquisition takes a really broad view of the word “photography.” Photograms? That’s photography. Collage? Photography. Images from the internet, controlled into a mosaic? Photography.For AGO curatorial fellow Marina Dumont-Gauthier, who assisted put the show together, it’s important to continually be reevaluating what photography is, due to the fact that”photography is still a young art,”compared to painting or sculpture, and it continues to progress rapidly.The exhibition showcases 10 new additions to the AGO’s
collection, which concern the gallery as part of the Canada Now Photography Acquisition Effort. Professional Photographer Edward Burtynsky and gallerist Nicholas Metivier conceived the effort in the spring of 2020 as a method to assistance artists throughout COVID.”Holding my Grandmother’s Oranges “by Aaron Jones (2021 ). (Art Gallery of Ontario)The artists featured in the collection come from a range of backgrounds, both artistically and culturally, and are based in all corners of the nation. The thing they all share is that they each bring a special technique to the medium.Toronto-based artist Aaron Jones’piece”Holding My Granny’s Oranges”is the very first image audiences see when they walk into the gallery. A five-foot-by-six-foot photo collage, it centres on an image taken from a postcard,advertising California oranges, that hung in his late grandmother’s cooking area. He says that for him, the oranges symbolize what he calls a”utopian access to food.” The oranges are protected by what he refers to as a”gollum”constructed of hands. The hands were drawn from images of NBA gamers from the 1990s and 2000s that were given to him by a friend.”My grandma came here from Jamaica,” he says.”My mom and her siblings and bros are all immigrants. I think it was the very first time, when they got here, where they would for sure have food– not that they didn’t have food in Jamaica, but it
was more for sure [here] And for myself, growing up, I was given that advantage of, like, ‘Enter the refrigerator. Take whatever you want.'”He adds that, as a”kid of the ’90s,” even though he wasn’t a big sports fan, the images of basketball player’s hands spoke with him. “Tokyo/Damascus” by Sanaz Mazinani( 2012).(Art Gallery of Ontario )”[ The hands] are extremely well-lit, and I similar to how real they felt,”he states.” And it’s kind of bringing those youth influences into the style of the gollum.
“Initially glimpse, Sanaz Mazinani’s “Tokyo/Damascus “does not seem a photography-related project
at all. The piece is done in the fractal design of standard Islamic ornamentation. It’s a kind of style that Mazinani– who was born in Iran and pertained to Canada when she was 11
— was surrounded by maturing. It‘s only when you get extremely close that you realize that the pattern is comprised of pictures of the Occupy Movement protest in Tokyo and Arab Spring demonstrations in Damascus, Syria, duplicated over and over once again.”The concept behind [Islamic decoration] is that it changes your understanding of the space, “she says.”Within the religious context, it’s supposed to kind of change you to this divine other world.” The piece is indicated to stimulate that same sensation, however in a more nonreligious context: to get us to transcend where we are
right now and imagine a better world.”In this context, I wanted to utilize it to take us somewhere else, where the world is not so harsh,”she says. “Someplace that’s more interesting or much better.” “Afghan and Canadian soldiers in a trench mark their position with smoke during a drone strike on insurgents in Panjwa’i District, Kandahar, Afghanistan,”by Louie Palu (2010 ).( Art Gallery of Ontario )Other
pieces in the exhibition also take a large range of approaches to photography. A few of it comes from a documentary or photojournalism tradition,
like photos of the war in Afghanistan by Louie Palu, images of Black Lives Matter demonstrations printed on enormous banners by Jalani Morgan, and Robert Kautuk’s drone shots of his house community of Kangiqtugaapik, Nunavut, including one of a walrus being butchered on an ice floe.Others take a more experimental method, like Laurie Kang’s series of photograms of onion and fire wood bags, made by placing the bags straight onto photosensitive paper. Montreal-based Inuk artist asinnajaq took an image of shallow water in James Bay, then printed it on a thin polyester sheet hung from the ceiling. As audiences walk the piece, they cause the sheet to move, making it look like the water is shifting.Mazinani states that, to her, the typical thread in between all the pieces in We Are Story is the capability of photography to notify the audience about the world around them.”All these jobs are speaking about something that we’re experiencing together, in various methods, right now,”she states.”They’re existing. They matter.”