The stated theme of this year’s Contact photography festival is figure and ground. There’s an open invitation: landscape, still life, portrait, pretty well anything goes, but it’s up to the main show at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on Queen Street West to draw those strands together. It does so provocatively by juxtaposing images by four international photographers that include Olga Chagaoutdinova’s view of a grim Russian bathroom tiled with gaudy images of some island paradise and Scarlett Hooft Graafland’s surreal interventions into the Arctic landscape including antlers floating in melting ice.
From Mississauga to the Beaches, from North York to Harbourfront, that theme is picked up again and again in 50 curated gallery exhibits and public installations featuring the work of about 80 different artists. The month-long festival, most of which is free, also includes another 150 venues that are voluntarily participating by hanging the photography of another 1,000 artists. Here are some good bets amongst the riches:
Mirrored by Maslen & Mehra
General Hardware Contemporary, 1520 Queen St. W.
British artists Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra create mirrors in the shape of human silhouettes, place them in well-known natural or urban settings and photograph them, creating images where reflections of ground, sand, pavement or water take human form and stand as eerie portals into the depicted scene. These unsettling interventions seem tailor-made for this year’s Contact as they people their landscapes in ways that suggest both a confrontation and a confusion between figure and ground.
Vancouver by Fred Herzog
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen St. W.
Perhaps this is the biggest find of this year’s Contact: In the 1950s, German immigrant and medical photographer Fred Herzog began photographing his new home on colour slide film. These pulsating images of downtown Vancouver street life in the 1950s and ’60s feel like Canada’s answer to LIFE photography as they catch men smoking cigarettes, gamblers eyeing a win or mothers pushing strollers against a backdrop of neon signs and dirty pavement. The complexity of their colour is revealed through contemporary inkjet technology, as the 21st century brings the 20th to life.
“Where I was Born …” by Abel Boulineau
Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St. W.
The AGO is offering another remarkable find, a series of 19th-century photographs of life in rural France newly attributed to the minor French painter Abel Boulineau. It’s a great art-mystery story: the photographs had been wrongly attributed because Mr. Boulineau was unknown as a photographer but gallery intern Vanessa Fleet found, among other evidence, a photo of washerwomen that is clearly the source for one of his paintings. This is one of the rare historical shows in Contact, a festival always much stronger on contemporary work.
Avenue Patrice Lumumba by Guy Tillim
Design Exchange, 234 Bay St.
These large-scale photographs of decaying late-modernist colonial architecture in southern and western Africa are a must-see. The South African photojournalist Guy Tillim eschews a post-colonial political interpretation of these public buildings left behind by the Europeans, preferring to see them as a “floating world,” unanchored to the Africa that still uses them. In truth, these big, haunting images encourage many readings.
Illuminated Manuscripts by Robert Bean
The McLuhan Program, University of Toronto, 39A Queen's Park Crescent E.
