Making CONTACT

Submitted by Magenta on Wed, 05/19/2010 - 22:19

Editors' Picks

David LaChapelle: The Rape of Africa (2009): Courtesy the artist and Fred Torres Collaborations.

As this issue goes live, Toronto is in the grips of photo fever. Each May, Toronto turns into the world’s photography capital during the CONTACT Photography festival, which takes place in venues of all kinds across the city. Only have a few hours to take in some shows? Here’s our five must-see (and readily accessible) picks:

David LaChapelle at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (to May 31)
952 Queen St. West

Celebrity and fashion photographer David LaChapelle has made the move into fine art galleries and exhibitions in recent years, but he has lost none of the highly stylized gloss that makes his work immediately recognizable. His eye-popping photographic mural, The Rape of Africa, references Renaissance painting, as well as contemporary advertising, and features supermodel Naomi Campbell as the personification of Africa – beautiful, yet exploited, and unable to control the violence that plagues her.
Barbara Kruger: Untitled (It) (2010): Installation view. Photo: MagentaBarbara Kruger at the AGO (to August 30)
317 Dundas St. West

American artist Barbara Kruger’s boldly graphic work, which combines found images with text, uses the tropes of advertising to critique how marketing and our consumer society shapes individual identities. Her installation Untitled (It) was commissioned by the AGO and CONTACT, and spans the entire block-long glass ‘skirt’ of the building.
Ryan McGinley: Blue Falling (2007): Courtesy the artist and Team Gallery, New York.The Mechanical Bride at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (to June 6)
952 Queen St. West

If you’ve gone to see the LaChapelle mural, you might as well step into the MoCCA to take in CONTACT’s featured exhibition. Titled after Marshall McLuhan’s book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), in which the author analyzed the symbolism and implications of advertising imagery and text, this exhibition gathers together work by Canadian and international artists to do much the same thing. Among the artists featured are Josephine Meckseper, Ryan McGinley, Kota Ezawa and Dana Claxton.
Penelope Umbrico: Broken Sets (eBay) (2009-10): Courtesy the artist and PM Gallery, Toronto.Penelope Umbrico at PM Gallery (to May 30)
1518 Dundas Street West

Umbrico is the chair of MFA Photography at Bard College, and her CONTACT show, Broken Sets (eBay) are photographs of just that – found images of broken LCD screens that their owners have turned on (to show that their components still work), photographed and then posted to eBay to sell for parts. Umbrico then cropped and blew up the images to about the size of the average wall-mounted LCD screen. The resulting images feel like colourful, hard-edged abstractions.
Chris Ironside and Suzy Lake: From the series Family Values: Work & Play (2010): Courtesy the artists.‘What’s the Hype?’ on the TTC (to May 31)

The Toronto Transit Commission’s LCD monitors play host to a number of projects by Toronto-based artists, including Chris Ironside and the pioneering feminist artist Suzy Lake, who collaborated on a series of playfully absurd portraits of themselves as sisters, cavorting in Anne of Green Gables-like scenarios, as well as Celia Berkovic, Toni Hafkenscheid, Geoffrey Pugen and Lori Newdick.