Mardi 14 Avril 2015 17:19:03 par Clarisse Treilles dans Festivals

The CONTACT Festival presents three photo exhibitions opening Wednesday, April 29, 2015.


Mark Ruwdel (b. 1954, American, Canadian citizen) has become one of Canada’s most respected landscape photographers during a career spanning three decades. Working primarily in the western territories of the United States and Canada, Ruwedel documents traces and imprints of human activity on the earth. He describes the process as “an inquiry into the histories, cultural and natural, of places that reveal the land as both a field of human endeavour and an agent of historical processes.” A primary exhibition of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

© Mark Ruwdel

Canada By Rail and By Sea (2007–2011) presents a selection from two series of elegiac landscapes by acclaimed Canadian artist Scott Conarroe. Capturing vast stretches of North America, Conarroe travelled the continent to systematically document railways, ports, coastlines, and their immediate environments with a contemporary, clear-eyed romanticism. Seen together, the Canadian views of By Rail (2007–2009) and its continuation By Sea (2009–2011) reveal the significant contribution of transportation infrastructures to Canada’s territorial expansionism, and to the construction and unification of our national identity. From one coast to the other, Conarroe’s exploration juxtaposes human-built habitations and industrial structures with seemingly infinite natural horizons of ocean and land. His poetic vistas evoke the past while addressing environmental and social concerns arising from the post-industrial decay of the Western world.

© Scott Conarroe

Working with prominent Canadian photographer, filmmaker and writer Michael Mitchell, second-year students from Ryerson University’s Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management program explore the artist’s rich and diversified career in the context of his personal photography collection. This exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue and digital publication, juxtaposes a selection of Mitchell’s own work alongside nineteenth and twentieth century photographs from his collection, and excerpts from his prolific writings.

© Michael Mitchell

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