At the Frankovich and Cronenberg Reception:

Before nightfall, and before things got  hectic (in a good way!) at the Frankovich and Cronenberg opening on Thursday evening, urban cycling consultant and photographer Yvonne Bambrick  arrived and snapped some candid shots, just a few of which are below:

Lower Gallery

 Caitlin Cronenberg and gallery owner Kristyn Wong-Tam

 

 Caitlin's dad, David Cronenberg

Upper Gallery: Gallery Administrator Jessica Vallentin with artists Daryl Vocat and Johnson Ngo.

David Frankovich and partner, artist Laura Paolini.

Caitlin Cronenberg is seeing RED

From Rebecca Spence"s article in the National Post, May 4, 2011:

"Last June, photographer Caitlin Cronenberg spent a full day snuggled up on her couch with her laptop, a cup of tea and a hard drive holding 54 folders filled with scanned photos from the New York Times Canadian Photo Archive. She didn’t move for eight hours as she examined about 24,000 photos, using her gut to decide which ones should be mounted and displayed in RED, an exhibit set to go on display in September as part of last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. After several days, she had narrowed the photos down to 40. By the time the exhibit launched, there were only a dozen.
Christopher Bratty, co-founder of toromagazine.com and Black Angus Media, purchased the archive’s collection of photos in an effort to trace the evolution of Canada over the past century. He then commissioned Cronenberg to use her bold and contemporary artistic vision to curate RED, which is now a part of Toronto’s CONTACT Photography Festival, featuring eight photos from the original exhibit that will be mounted at KWT Gallery until May 31.
The photos from the archive date back to 1910 and cover a diverse assortment of themes. Notable photos of Canadian icons include Pierre Trudeau, Karen Kain and Barbara-Ann Scott, while others feature international figures on official visits to Canada, including the Royal Family and Winston Churchill. But these aren’t the images that will be on display at RED.
“We wanted to use photos that showed Canada in a way that we haven’t really seen before,” says Cronenberg, daughter of acclaimed Canadian director David Cronenberg.
The photographer’s favourite image is QEW at Night, which shows the Ontario highway back when it was just a car stop. Other personal highlights include Virgin Mary on a Plane, which tells the story of a priest who flew a statue of the Virgin Mary all over the world for missionary work; and Nurses in NY, which depicts a group of Canadian nurses in long black coats and hats standing on the roof of the Empire State Building."
read more here

Opening reception tonight, from 7:30 to 9 pm.

Frankovich and Cronenberg: Opening Thurs. May 5, 2011

KWT Contemporary is pleased to present two exhibitions in association with the

Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

 

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday May 5, 2011 from 7:30 - 9 p.m.

David Frankovich: Plus de Deux 

KWT Contemporary is very pleased to announce our first presentation of time-based work, as we continue to unroll our new curatorial mission following our re-launch in February.

Starting Thursday, May 5, and running through to May 28th, KWT Contemporary will mount a continuous screening David Frankovich's remarkably beautiful 13 minute single channel video, "Plus de Deux". Frankovich, a very talented young experimental film maker, is a recent  graduate of the Experimental Film program at York University. "Plus de Deux" is inspired by, and a tribute to, Norman MacLaren's classic short film, "Pas de Deux,".

Frankovich has used digital compression artifacts to open up possibilities for representation. A technique called "datamoshing" is used to edit the video, which allows for the composition of one shot to be carried over to the next, and transformed by that shot's movement.  The image becomes unstable and littered with digital artifacts and traces of previous shots. Colours are swept across the frame by the dancers' movements, like the stroke of a paintbrush, and bleed into one another. The dancers' bodies themselves become transformed, and gender becomes unstable as they transition between male and female forms. A rigid gender binary gives way to a fluid spectrum of possibilities, lying just beyond the represented. The dancers' bodies become increasingly abstracted. All that remains is form, colour and movement.

The film will be available for purchase as a special signed and numbered DVD, edition of 10.
  

Preview the video here.

Also included in the exhibition are archival pigment prints, (selected stills from the video, edition of 5 each, image size 47" x 20"). Printed on fine art paper, these prints have a dynamic and painterly quality.  Figures are captured mid-transition, in between states of maleness and femaleness, in a state of motion between two states of rest. In contrast to the video, in which these moments are fleeting, as prints, they become frozen in time. Consequently, our attention becomes drawn away from the figure as male or female, towards gender as a field or landscape through which these bodies move.

Caitlin Cronenberg "RED: Selections from the New York Times Canadian Archive"

Christopher Bratty, co-founder of TOROmagazine.com and Black Angus Media, purchased the New York Times Canadian Archive with a goal of both preserving this remarkable historical record in it's intact form, but also to use as a jumping-off point for an ongoing artistic project. It is Bratty's intention to invite Canadian artists to select images from the Archive and to provide their own unique interpretations of this historical record. Emerging photographer Caitlin Cronenberg is the first artist to have been invited by Bratty to participate in this multi-year project.

Caitlin Cronenberg's "RED" features interventions and re-imaginings of eight images selected from the New York Times Canadian Photography Archive. Using digital alterations, salvaged barnwood frames, and remote-controlled lightboxes, Cronenberg has produced a dramatic and cinematic narrative, resulting in a succession of revealing glimpses into how Americans have historically viewed Canadian culture, and how Canadians in turn view themselves. Dating back to 1910, the Archive consists of 24,000 images taken by New York Times photographers forming an invaluable cultural record that traces the evolution of Canada as a nation.

In addition to Cronenberg's interventions, framed reproductions of the 8 original images she selected from the Archive will be on display and available for purchase.