Every spring, the Contact Photography Festival offers Torontonians a wide range of photography exhibits in a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional spaces.
This year’s festival theme is “Field of Vision,” which explores photography as a way of seeing through exhibitions across the city, including some in our area, in galleries on Ossington, public spaces on Dundas, and cafes and galleries on Queen West.
The festival launches this Wednesday, May 1st with a party at MOCCA, and features some entertaining and interesting exhibits close to home. At Angell Gallery, see the Alex McLeod show “Outworld,” which opened this past weekend. We already got a sneak peek of his computer-generated photographs of what look like dioramas, but are really all fantastic virtual creations.
Also on Ossington, O’Born Contemporary features Edith Maybin’s “The Girl Document,” interestingly titled as it shows how photography is not always completely truthful. The show opens on May 10th with a reception from 6-9PM and continues until June 8th.
Oz Studios also participates in this year’s Contact Festival, with “There, Not There” featuring work from Joshua MacDonald. You can see this exhibit from May 1-15, and there will be a launch party on May 8th, from 6-10PM.
Starting today at Dundas and Ossington, you will be able to see part of an outdoor art exhibit on billboards in the west end. Called “To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light,” it consists of old photos of white women culled from Kodak’s archives, images originally used to calibrate skin tone in photographs. This exhibit is created in partnership of Gallery TPW on Dundas Street West.
There are many galleries on Queen West participating in Contact, and you can also experience the festival at alternative venues, including a few cafes on Queen, like Almacen and Cafe Bernate.
Let us know which exhibits you’re seeing, in the comments or twitter!
