Reception: RMG Fridays, March 4, 7-10pm
Symposium: March 19,  2016 from 10am – 4pm

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has long been acclaimed for documentary, animated and feature films, which are among Canada’s iconic cultural products and exports. But few Canadians know that during a pivotal period in the country’s history—the mid-twentieth century—the NFB also functioned as the country’s official photographer.

Mandated by the federal government to promote the nation, the NFB’s Still Photography Division produced an “official” portrait of Canadian society. The Division commissioned its photographers to travel across the country, where they shot approximately 250,000 images of people, places, work, leisure, and cultural activities. Millions of Canadians as well as international audiences saw these photographs reproduced in newspapers, magazines, books, filmstrips, and exhibitions. The Other NFB looks at the how this agency imagined Canada and Canadian identity, what role photographs played in that imagining, and how the NFB’s photographic archive was—and continues to be—used.

The image of Canada produced by the NFB is celebratory and optimistic. The pressures and hardships of life during the Second World War and in subsequent decades are rarely visible. Instead, the photographs champion the country’s scenic beauty. They extol the Canadian economy in shoots on forestry, mining, and agricultural plenitude, and its booming urban centres. They honour Canadian artists, scientists and politicians. They depict thousands of unidentified citizens, and chart Canada’s increasingly diverse population. They also reflect trends in photojournalism and commercial photography of the day, and are among the most dynamic media images produced in mid-twentieth-century Canada.

The NFB did not construct Canadian national identity through the grand gestures of public monuments or stirring political oratory that we typically associate with nation building. Instead, it produced representations of the everyday, rendered in photography, a common and accessible medium. Such images were powerful in part because they were so familiar, so widely available, and so unassuming: they formed a kind of backdrop to daily life in Canada.

Taken together, the NFB’s Still Division photographs create a composite portrait of Canada made from nationalistic and bureaucratic points of view. The NFB aspired not just to present an image of the country, but the image. As a result, the NFB holds a unique position in the history of Canadian visual culture as a conveyor of shared values and governmental programs in photographic form.

Opening: RMG Fridays January 8, 7-10pm

This ten-year mid-career retrospective of the photographs of Holly King is comprised of four of her most recent series: Twisted Roots, Mangroves: Floating Between Two Worlds, Grand Canyon: Unscene and the recently completed English Cliffs series. Two of the series more clearly represent her constructed work, while the other two are based more obviously in reality. King states that her photographs are a “celebration of sublime beauty in nature.”

While King is not out to deceive the viewer with her constructed landscapes, her sets have, until now, remained in the studio. With this exhibition, she has included two viewing boxes: elegantly designed cabinets into which one peers and sees a landscape built using forced perspective. Her meticulously rendered “rocks and trees” are visible for all, outside the context of her enlarged photographs. The box becomes a personal space for the viewer, a point of contemplation. King notes that with this structure, she hopes to “construct a partially believable poetic place.”

Montreal-based artist Holly King, manufactures both the beautiful and sublime and is interested in “the tension between artifice and illusion generated.” King has said that her work is a “search for a deep silence.” Her photographs, both constructed and real, serve, through a vastness of scale, depth of colour or the richness of the blacks in her monochromatic work, to allow the viewer to delight in the beautiful, and to savour the silence in the face of the sublime.

The RMG will also present Holly King’s photograph Chalk Shoreline in the windows of Core21, a co-working space in downtown Oshawa. This project is the first of a series of artworks in the windows of downtown businesses, and an on-going partnership with the RMG and Core21.

A 120 page, bilingual hardcover, publication will accompany the exhibition and be available at the RMG Shop and ABC Art Books Canada. The publication includes colour images, portfolios and essay by Francine Paul and Linda Jansma.

Born in Montreal, King studied visual arts at Laval University, where she earned her BFA in 1979. She then studied visual arts and modern dance at York University, completing her MFA in 1981. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally and her work is widely collected, including institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario among others. She teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

Read the catalogue!

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, in collaboration with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) will present Beyond Measure: Domesticating Distance this fall. The exhibition brings together the works of five contemporary South Asian artists as they examine the voids and brims of living in a diaspora. Tazeen Qayyum, Abdullah M.I. Syed, Asma Sultana, Surendra Lawoti and Meera Margaret Singh critically dissect cultural duality and the resulting hybrid identities.

They share accounts that add to an overarching collective narrative that has come to describe an in-between space. Hovering between recollection, narration and reflection their works record acts of searching for the familiar in the foreign, of repurposing the past in the present and of locating oneself within displacement. Working with performance and installation, photography and sculpture, writing and sewing and moving image and text, their multidisciplinary practices echo the diversity of their layered experiences.

Emanating from personal narratives, the works carry a deliberate autobiographical significance as each artist dissects the fissures and dislocations caused by distance. Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, England, Australia, Brazil, America, and Canada provide the spaces and intertwining histories for these accounts shaped by movement. The exhibition collocates these works to further understand, as well as complicate, ideas of familiarity and strangeness, nostalgia and paranoia, and community and the individual.

Read the catalogue!

As host of TORONTO 2015’s boxing and weightlifting competitions, Oshawa continues to celebrate the spirit of sport. This exhibition showcases the history of athletics in Oshawa, with historical photographs from the Thomas Bouckley Collection.

Athletic competition in almost every sport has been an integral part of life in Oshawa for nearly 150 years. Summer sports such as golf, lacrosse and baseball and winter sports like hockey and curling are deeply rooted in Oshawa’s history, acting as popular past-times in Oshawa since the late 1800s. Originally competing amongst other local teams, as the population in the area grew, sports teams began to compete with neighbouring towns and eventually on a provincial, national, and international level. From Oshawa’s earliest days, large outdoor parks such as Prospect Park and Alexandra Park have been used as sport facilities, where hundreds of spectators would gather to watch baseball and lacrosse games, as well as bicycle races and tennis matches.

Oshawa’s athletes and sports teams continue to achieve success today. Perhaps most notably, the Oshawa Generals hockey team, a great source of pride in the community since 1937, have won multiple championships over the years and produced legendary players such as Bobby Orr and Eric Lindros. For decades, Oshawa’s numerous professional athletes have trained and competed on the national and international stage, bringing home top awards from competitions around the world. This exhibition provides a window into the lives of local teams and athletes by tracing the rich legacy of Oshawa’s sporting history.