Toronto, ON – Opening on June 20 and running until August 10, 2013, the gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Duane Linklater, organized by Althea Thauberger.
 
Linklater’s exhibition, titled Learning, is anchored by two iconic photographs. The first depicts an Oka warrior, Richard Nicholas, standing on top of an overturned Sûreté du Québec vehicle, photographed during the Oka Crisis in 1990. The second is an image of Kurt Cobain playing guitar during Nirvana’s Unplugged session for MTV in 1993. Both of these images are several steps removed from their “originals”: Linklater tracked them down on the web, and re-photographed them from his computer screen using a digital SLR camera. What Linklater presupposes with this pairing are multiple potential meanings, but funnels them through two other elements that speak to the photographs’ “geographical origins and familial relationships”: a print by the late Ojibwa artist Benjamin Chee Chee (from which Linklater’s exhibition takes its name), and a custom-made wall work based on the logo of Ontario Northland, the primary transportation carrier for northern Ontario. While these four elements elide a straightforward explanation of the connections between them, each in turn extend Linklater’s investigations of ownership—from indigenous property rights to the artist’s fluid appropriations of signifiers between popular and indigenous cultures.
 
Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree, from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario and is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He obtained a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta, followed by a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College. Recent solo exhibitions include Something about Encounter, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay, Ontario; Modest Livelihood (in collaboration with Brian Jungen), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta and the Reva and David Logan Centre Gallery, University of Chicago, Chicago; Beothuck Building, Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Raspberry Cargo, Family Business Gallery, New York City. His work has been included in group shows at The Power Plant, Toronto, Ontario; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; UBS Gallery, Redhook, New York City; The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta; and Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton. Linklater is on the long list for the 2013 Sobey Art Award.

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present Feed, an exhibition by artist Tonia Di Risio. During the summer of 2006, Di Risio traveled to a small town in Italy and recorded a series of women preparing a variety of local dishes in their kitchens. The videos were prompted by her desire to learn family recipes from her Italian relatives in the absence of a fluent common language by observing them working and cooking in their home kitchens. The video installation Feed includes single-channel pieces as well as a multi-channel projection highlighting an edited compilation of cooking sessions which bring together generations of women through the language of food, while also examining the tradition of passing and sharing of family recipes. Di Risio’s practice has involved an investigation of gendered domesticity in relation to housekeeping, home maintenance, and interior decoration primarily through time-based media including photography, video and audio recording.
 
A multi media artist who lived and worked in Halifax for 15 years, Tonia Di Risio relocated to Southern Ontario in 2012. She received a BA in Art and Art History from the University of Toronto and Sheridan College and an MFA from the University of Windsor. She has exhibited across Canada and has been the recipient of Canada Council and Nova Scotia arts grants.
 
www.toniadirisio.com

VID INGELEVICS
Between art & Art
 
Exhibition Dates: June 22 – July 20, 2013
 
Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition of work by Vid Ingelevics.
 
“Between art & Art” is based on observations Ingelevics made during research in the photography archives of public institutions in North America and Europe. Ingelevics (b. Toronto, Ontario, 1952) examined the historical work of usually anonymous museum staff photographers and noted how they and their work seemed to be situated somewhere between the “art” of photography – usually understood as technical practice - and the “Art” that was often their subject.
 
In the late 1990s, while working on the exhibition, “Camera Obscured,” which addressed the use of photography in public museums, Ingelevics noted that the uncertainty of the staff photographers’ institutional position seemed to extend to the images they produced. He was often unable to determine why some images were made or even what their original subjects were. In many cases, little or no information accompanied the images because, at the time of their creation, their meaning was held to be stable, factual and self-evident. For those who made and used the images, the question of meaning was simply obvious and no meta-data or captioning beyond the barest minimum seemed necessary.
 
As years passed and those responsible for the production and use of the images were no longer at the institution, the lived experience that produced a context and sustained a certain understanding of the images dissipated. Ingelevics’ fascination with what now seemed so contradictory – a large format, sharp, highly-detailed image that appeared to be so purposeful, but so oddly arbitrary – led him to attempt the “impersonation” of one of those long forgotten museum staff photographers. From 2000 to 2008 he returned to many of the same institutions and, using similar large format camera equipment, he produced contemporary images of these sites that might have been made years earlier.
 
Ingelevics is an artist, curator and educator based in Toronto. He has exhibited his art and curated exhibitions across Canada, the U.S. and Europe at both private galleries and public institutions. He is the recipient of various awards, including grants from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. His photographs can be found in private and public collections, including the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; The City of Toronto Archives, Toronto; the Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark and the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland. He is currently an Associate Professor at Ryerson University, Toronto.