Spring/Summer Exhibitions Opening Party

Wednesday, May 8, 2024 6–8 pm
The Image Centre, 33 Gould St., Toronto

Join us to celebrate the opening of a new season of exhibitions, including Scotiabank Photography Award: Ken Lum. Light refreshments and cash bar available.

Exhibitions on View:

Scotiabank Photography Award: Ken Lum

This exhibition, comprising signature series along with new works, celebrates the career of Canadian artist Ken Lum, winner of the 2023 Scotiabank Photography Award. Lum is internationally known for his conceptualist and often humorous approach, which draws on methods from cultural and social studies, semiology, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy. The artist’s impactful practice utilizes photography to investigate the relationship between language and representation in the public space. By doing so, Lum critically challenges the social hierarchies and dominant narratives related to identity, class, and gender that are always at play in capitalist and postcolonial societies.

Clarissa Tossin: Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia/Alberta, Michigan

Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan positions moving images of nearly identical Ford Motor Company towns in dialogue with one another. The left side of the video moves across Belterra, a rubber plantation village in the Amazon forest, while the right shows Alberta, a sawmill town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Both were built at the same time in 1935 for the purposes of producing rubber and wood for the manufacturing of the Model T in the United States. Depicting the two towns in parallel, the work focuses in and out of residential buildings, tree harvests, moments of daily life and natural landscapes. Articulating the tensions between simulacrum and authenticity that inform these pre-planned communities, Tossin’s use of mirroring across disparate but deeply linked geographies both establishes and unsettles a sense of space and place. Ultimately, Streamlined offers a subtle inquiry into the histories of globalized production and their material and social residues.

Hypervisibility: Early Photography and Privacy in North America, 1839–1900

Given the current ubiquity of cameras and the broad circulation of photographs in this digital age, photography can be understood as a threat to privacy. But even in its earliest forms—from daguerreotypes, cartes de visite, and stereographs to commercial advertising—the medium triggered both excitement and concerns about heightened visibility. Photography carried various risks and rewards based on gender, race, class, and disability. This exhibition considers some of those aspects as it traces the fascinating interrelated and overlooked histories of photography and privacy in the nineteenth century.

This exhibition draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Working Machines: Postwar America Through Werner Wolff’s Commercial Photography
Drawing from the Werner Wolff Archive held at The Image Centre, the exhibition and accompanying publication Working Machines explore the practice of a commercial photographer in postwar America. Wolff’s images of workers, commodities, and urban landscapes document the accelerated rise of capitalism through massive industrialization and consumerism in the 1950s and 1960s. The project illuminates the historical conditions and aesthetic of a practice rarely considered in the history of photography, one of a “generalist” photographer working for a variety of clients, including the illustrated press, the advertising industry, and the corporate sector.

This exhibition was organized by the 2023–2024 second-year students of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management program. All prints and materials included in this exhibition are from the Werner Wolff Archive and the Black Star Collection, The Image Centre.

In Dimension: Personal and Collective Narratives

In Dimension: Personal and Collective Narratives is a group exhibition bringing together works by emerging artists who participated in The Image Centre’s Poy Family Youth in Focus Program. This program provides free, customized workshops for community organizations and youth in the Toronto area, offering hands-on photography-based activities that encourage critical thinking about the IMC’s exhibitions and promote explorations of image-making and storytelling processes.

This exhibition is supported through the generosity of The Poy Family.

Admission is always free.

Gallery Hours

Sunday–Tuesday: Closed

Wednesday: 12–8 pm

Thursday–Saturday: 12–6 pm

Exhibition Tours

Tuesday: By appointment

Wednesday–Friday: Drop-in, 1:30 pm