The Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival launches tonight with a party at MOCCA on Queen West. The festival’s theme this year is Public, which is increasingly relevant where people share the intimate details of their private lives online, and the distinction between what is private and public is changing daily.
You don’t have to travel far to experience the festival, although you can as sites range across the city. Lucky for us, many of our local galleries and art spaces are participating.
Oz Studios is part of the action, with “Rotating Reality” running May 6-27 with an opening on May 6, featuring Sandy Baron’s exhibit of playfully altered landscape photographs.
“Glass Ceiling,” Jill Greenberg’s project about the “setup” of being a woman, is opening tonight at O’Born Contemporary and will be running until June 2. (Above, from Jill Greenberg: American Girl Doll, 2010)
Don’t Tell Mama features the Chris Grismer exhibit “New Suburban Photomat,” which explores and plays with new photographic processes to create experimental portraits. The opening is May 5 from 7-10pm, and the exhibit is up through May 31st. (Below, a photo from this exhibit: Superfriends, 2010).
“No Permanent Address” has been showing at Gallery TPW for much of April and garnered acclaim, and the run continues through the festival until May 26. No Permanent Address is a three channel video portrait of the New People’s Army, a Maoist guerrilla group in the Philippines.
“The Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” Angell Gallery‘s offering to Contact, will be sure to draw attention. We’ve all enjoyed the strange unexpected images snapped by Google’s cameras while mapping the world. Jon Rafman’s series compiles “a fascinating array of incidental moments captured by Google’s cameras.” The exhibit opens May 3 from 6-9P until June 2.
If you are enjoying the festival, let us know what you’ve seen and what you recommend seeing.
