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Roberto Pellegrinuzzi calls images like these landscapes, though it's a loose rubric at best. Working in extreme close-up with natural materials likes leaves, he allows light to pass through before capturing it as a photograph, and then layered, reconfiguring his humble subjects into a type of transcendent abstraction. At the Leo Kamen Gallery, 80 Spadina Ave, Ste 406, to May 28.
Lee Goreas was drawn to the iconic form of the golf ball because of its “violent use in the landscape.” Though they’re mass-produced objects, the texture of each one’s dimpled surface, the dirt, its scars, gained from many violent journeys through the ether, renders each unique. But admit it: All you really noticed was the text, wasn’t it? So don’t be thinking Goreas doesn’t know that. Made you look. At the Birch Libralato Gallery, 129 Tecumseth Street, until June 4.
Last year, Vancouver artist Kevin Schmidt inscribed a large cedar slab with particular grisly passages from the Bible’s Book of Revelations, describing the near-destruction of the human race amid the fabled final confrontation between good and evil. That he put it way out on the ice near Tuktoyaktuk, in the Northwest Territories, provided an apt comment on our species’ tin ear for apocalyptic warning signs (Schmidt’s installing it on top of prime oil exploration territory helped drive that point home nicely.) When the ice melted, the sign floated away, putting a fine point on our willful blindness; re-installed on our waterfront in effigy, as an photo of the long-gone sign, gives it another chance to be seen and heard. At the Power Plant, 235 Queen’s Quay West, south façade (lake side). To August 21.
Eric Gottesman is an American artist who works mostly in photography and video. Significantly, much of his work is the product of his community activism in various impoverished regions around the world, most notably with Sudden Flowers, the children’s art collective he helped found over a decade ago in Ethiopia. The image you see here is of Gottesman and a 12-year old girl member of the collective, Tenanesh Kifyalew; she died in 2004. You’re right to be slightly disturbed by the image; aside from the obvious stylization — the girl, drained and powdered-looking in black and white, evokes nothing so much as a corpse prepared for funeral; Gottesman, meanwhile, is contrastingly normal — the dynamic of a westerner mining impoverished circumstances for his art has its own troubling set of circumstances. If you want, you can ask him yourself: Gottesman is speaking today at Gallery TPW, 56 Ossington Ave., at 3 pm.
Lynne Cohen is one of three artists up for the newly-minted $50,000 Scotiabank Photography Award — the others are Robin Collyer and Roy Arden; winner to be announced May 18 — and rightly so: For nearly 40 years, Montreal-based Cohen has been at the forefront of a widespread photographic inquiry into the impact of modernity’s enforced chilliness on our daily lives. Cohen shoots de-populated interiors, oscillating between public and private — men’s clubs and military installations, classrooms and swimming pools — to expose a simple, pervasive truth: Minus the living flesh to warm it up, the world we’ve built to live in is quietly inhuman. At the Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Ave. To June 1.
Montreal-based Jessica Eaton has been gaining momentum recently for a photography-based practice that tries to unpack the very nature of the medium itself. Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as an abstract photograph — the shutter opens and light registers, leaving an impression of something tangible, however indistinct — but for an artist preoccupied with such strictures, it’s rich territory to mine. Eschewing digital technology for the hands-on richness of film, Eaton masks her negatives in-camera and applies filters that here produces a photographic facsimile of Divisionism, a late-19th century Neo-Impressionist painting technique of applying colour not in swatches, but a tight network of dots or patches. Eaton’s reference is apt as she strives here for much the same: Radical representation, but representation nonetheless. At the Contact Gallery, 80 Spadina Ave, Suite 310. To May 31.
How broad is Contact’s reach across the GTA? Broad enough that festival exhibitions find themselves in high-security zones like Pearson International’s domestic departures plaza, on the other side of the x-rays and metal detectors. In truth, a trove of permanent art on the other side of the screen has long made Terminal One one of the better museums in town — it’s the home of our city’s one-and-only Richard Serra — and this year marks the fifth time Contact has installed at Pearson. As ever, it’s a good one: A series of pictures by Josef Schulz capture the mundanity of workaday temporary architecture — all corrugated metal and right angles — in an array of dazzling colour. That tension between prosaic and exuberant gives a strong dose of visual pop, but in proportion and colour massing, Schulz’s precise compositions evoke colour something else entirely: Late-era abstract colour field painting. At Pearson’s Terminal One, domestic departures, until Aug. 29.
Acclaimed Canadian photographer Robert Bourdeau has long been concerned with “how certain structures lose their identity and take on other feelings and ambiguities, and at other times become guardians or sentinels of physical and emotional space.” In his exhibition “The Station Point,” four decades of this inquiry are on display in his ghostly, seductive images of abandoned factories and dead-still train stations, among others places meant to contain multitudes, relegated to mete our their remaining days silent and alone. Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1026 Queen Street West. To June 11.
In 1975, a landmark photo exhibition called “New Topographics” addressed head-on the seismic shift that had taken place in landscape photography: The gorgeous, snow-laden trees of Ansel Adams were mythology, it said, and that these pictures, of cookie-cutter suburbs, desolate intersections and imposing prosaic structures like water towers were the dominant tropes of contemporary landscape aesthetics. Its aftershocks continue to reverberate, but Alejandro Cartagena's “Suburbia Mexicana” brings us a different view. Working in his home town of Monterrey, Cartagena's suburbs are less about banal idealism than the very real civic corruptions that have brought on bizarre perversions of that ideal that even the most devoted surburbanite would find jarring. Circuit Gallery, 345 Sorauren Avenue. To May 29.
Edward Burtynsky might be this country’s best-known photographer, which puts an onus on him to give the people what they want and surprise them at the same time. “Monegros,” a show of brand new work, does both in spades. Taken from a cool remove, the pictures, of parched farmland in Spain, show a landscape savagely altered by human intervention that is also staggeringly gorgeous. For Burtynsky, that’s nothing new. What is new is the evolution of his photographer’s eye in an almost painterly direction. The pictures, with their quiltwork land plots and bizarre, fanning dry pools, evoke for the eye notions of compositional abstraction at the same time as your mind is sure they are, chillingly, anything but. At the Nicholas Metivier Gallery, 451 King Street W., to May 28.
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