Flash Forward is the energetic title of an exhibition of work by 25 emerging photographers from two universities, Ryerson University's School of Image Arts, and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography and Imaging. The exhibition, which was organized by Toronto-based curators Sophie Hackett and Jennifer Long, is running almost simultaneously in two venues, at the Redux Gallery in New York, and at Lennox Contemporary here in Toronto, where the second half of the exhibition opened last night. The sister exhibitions are being presented by the Magenta Foundation, which, as its begetter -- the ebullient, unstoppably vivacious MaryAnn Camilleri -- points out, is "Canada's first publishing house dedicated to the arts."
Camilleri, who is Canadian but who has lived in New York for the past decade, working in art-book and photo-book publishing, came back to Canada last May to survey the photography scene, as it was showcased by the Contact festival. She liked what she saw so much she decided to stay. By mid-July she had founded Magenta. "It's a serious commitment," she says, her eyes twinkling merrily, "I had a good life in New York. I mean I wasn't kicked out or anything!"
Why magenta? "In printing," she says, "magenta is one of the make-or-break colours! It puts a smile on most people's faces," she adds. The covers of the Flash Forward catalogue are, of course, magenta. It's a hard colour to ignore, that's for sure.
I ask Camilleri and curators Hackett and Long the inevitable question about Canadian versus American photography.
Americans, says Hackett, tend to work from a long-established street-photography, documentary tradition. The Ryerson photographers, by contrast, tended to work in "more conceptual ways." The work of the Canadian photographers -- like Canadians generally -- tends to be "methodical and impressive," notes Camilleri. "They lack confidence," she says. "That's their only flaw."
The work making up Flash Forward seems pretty assured, however -- and for that matter, satisfyingly fresh and edgy. A lot of it has the up-close energy of a film or video still (Daniel Stein, Tracy Boulian, Sean Donnola and, in particular, the exquisitely cropped and superbly composed images of Adam Peters, from his aptly titled Crop series). Much of it is formally inventive (like Natalie Wei's 157-centimetre-long photo of an entire scarf). Some of it, like that of Janna Washington, Jennifer Lehe and Jennifer Ross, exudes "a seductive, pre-apocalyptic quiet," a phrase the curators have applied specifically to the work of Ryerson student Jesse Boles, whose prints from his Crude Landscape series have, in fact, won him Magenta's first annual Bright Spark Award -- which means, among other things, that his work gets placed in the corporate art collection of TD Canada Trust.
-- Flash Forward runs until April 30 at Lennox Contemporary, 12 Ossington Ave. (at Queen St. W.), 416-924-7964.