Susan McEachern: Structures of Meaning

Since the mid-1980s, Susan McEachern has examined the ways in which photography is involved in the production of cultural meaning. Her inquiry is supported by writings taken from historical, theoretical, and personal sources. In her early works, the artist used photographs, both as single images and in combination with text, to explore the social conditions of individual experience, in particular that of women. More recent projects examine the social values humans assign to nature. In all her projects, McEachern investigates the relation of photography to issues of family, community, and place. She uses her own home and family as one source of her subject matter. Other works draw on the locale of Nova Scotia, where she presently lives.

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Phil Bergerson: Shards of America

For over 25 years, Toronto photographer Phil Bergerson has explored "the quirky elements within the social landscape." The book Shards of America is the culmination of his 10-year odyssey through the signs that people leave behind, which speak both literally and figuratively about our culture and societal values. In this selection of highlights from the publication, Bergerson focuses on architecture, streets, and signage in complex and layered views. In these images, garish colours, scrawled messages, bizarre architectural elements, flags, newspapers,consumer goods, and kitschy artefacts clash and become the stage for a human comedy. An expanded version of the exhibition will tour to other galleries in Canada.

Meet the Artist
THURSDAY 7 OCTOBER AT 6 PM
Photographer Phil Bergerson will discuss his recent work Shards of America. In the Lecture Hall.

John Massey: The House That Jack Built

Since the late 1970s, John Massey's work has involved the transformation of material and perception, first through the articulation of scale models of rooms and more recently through his photographs of the architectural interiors. Working with minimal digital effects, he creates interiors that exist in a middle ground between the depicted and the created, touching on the metaphysical narratives that he has taken as his theme. The exhibition will feature 12 works, mainly gelatin silver prints from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000, as well as The Modern House Project (working title), a new work produced especially for the exhibition. An exhibition catalogue will be available at the CMCP Boutique. The exhibition will go on tour after leaving Ottawa.

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Nell Tenhaaf: Fit/Unfit. A Survey Exhibition

Explore the connections between art, science, medicine, and technology in this thought-provoking exhibition spanning the past 15 years of the career of Nell Tenhaaf, a Toronto-based multimedia artist whose work has been widely exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Tenhaaf uses aluminum light boxes, interactive video installations, photography, and drawing to engage viewers with her ideas. She mixes scientific diagrams with artistic renderings in her works as a means of questioning society's expectations of both disciplines, especially the notion that art is subjective and science, objective. For Tenhaaf, science, technology, and art are all invested with social and cultural values that speak to our deepest hopes and fears.

Nell Tenhaaf: Fit/Unfit is organized and circulated by The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in collaboration with the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

Christine Davis: Tlön

The slide installation Tlön, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, by Toronto artist Christine Davis, recreates the science-fiction world imagined by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges in his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. On Borges' shadowy planet Tlön, a secret society toils to control every detail of life. It is a cautionary tale against a highly ordered, highly regulated world that destroys other legitimate forms of experience and knowledge.

Davis' stunning visual interpretation of this story casts slides of stars and interstellar clouds onto a grid of brilliant blue Morpho butterflies. Light and colour shift and change; butterflies merge with celestial events. The effect of Davis' spectacular vision is both hypnotic and hallucinatory, a meditation on the appeal – and the absurdity – of order in the universe.

Vincent Sharp: From the Collection

Born in Toronto in 1937, Vincent Sharp was a self-taught painter who abandoned painting around 1966 and devoted himself to photography. By the mid-1970s, his work stood squarely within the social landscape movement that dominated a major part of Canadian photography in that decade. From the reflective surfaces used as a support for an amalgam of diverse images to austere still-life compositions, this exhibition covers 20 years of Sharp's photographic production.