Tag Archives: Photography

The Emergence of Architectural Modernism I (Victoria Modern Series)

Centennial Square Fountain, Rod Clack and Jack Wilkinson (c.1965)

The Emergence of Architectural Modernism in Victoria I: Town and Gown: Centennial Square and the Gordon Head Campus: Seminal Projects (1962-1972)

March 10 – May 2, 2011

Legacy Maltwood (at Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

Curated by Martin Segger

In the early 1960s two large architectural projects emerged in Victoria which redefined the urban landscape. The development of the Gordon Head Campus in its garden landscape suburban setting repositioned Victoria College as it emerged as the new University of Victoria. On a smaller scale the completion of Centennial Square, with its mix of heritage restoration and stridently modern buildings, provided a new direction for the revitalization of Victoria’s urban core.

This exhibition explores how these two important projects developed, sharing a mix of local young architects, planners and designers. In the process they created a set of iconic buildings and settings which set local architectural and design directions that have profoundly influenced urban design in Victoria to the present day.

No accompanying catalogue

Similar Exhibitions:

Victoria Modern Series Catalogues:

Victoria Modern 1: Investigating Postwar Architecture and Design on Southern Vancouver Island: an introduction (2005)

Victoria Modern 2: From a Modern Time: The Architectural Photography of Hubert Norbury: Victoria in the 50s and 60s (2009)

Victoria Modern 3: The Emergence of Architectural Modernism II; UVic and the Victoria Regional Aesthetic in the Late 1950s and 1960s (2011)

Click here for the Victoria Modern website

STAGE: Photographic Portraits

 

Untitled, Frank Pimentel, n.d.

Untitled, Frank Pimentel, n.d.

January 11 – February 2, 2011

Legacy Maltwood (at Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

Curated by Emma Conner, Toby Lawrence, Karen Merrifield & Holly Romanow

Showcasing the works of Frank Pimentel, Nina Raginsky and Ulli Steltzer, STAGE challenges the viewers to look beyond the aesthetic qualities of photographs to investigate the dichotomy of construction versus reality.

In looking at photographic portraiture there is a conflicting duality. The initial assumption is a presentation of reality, yet historically, portraiture was often staged, with subjects posed in front of painted backgrounds, accompanied by objects to augment certain elements of character. In the same sense, portraits by photographers Pimentel, Raginsky and Steltzer in the late twentieth century are constructions of their individual perceptions. Each with their own variation of portrait photography, the images provoke questioning into the significance of their compositional elements.

While the creation of the photograph is inherently determined by what the eye is able to see, the capture of something we perceive to be real instigates the reanalysis of our reality. The real movement becomes a constructed image, subject to point of view and created through the vision of the individual photographer. Like paintings and drawings, photographs are essentially the photographer’s own interpretation of the world. Raginsky states, “These photographs probably have little to do with an ordinary sense of reality; they are my particular stance on the world that I find at times to be rather thoughtless and brutal and difficult to endure.” Portrait photography has the ability to distort; yet also offers evidence into the existence of the subject or circumstances as they were at the time of the photograph.

As an alternate way of experiencing reality, the action of taking the photograph transforms the photographer into an active participant, the voyeur taking control of the situation. In this manner we experience authority held by the photograph itself, and we are forced, here, to make our own conclusions about the construction of spaces and placement of the subjects or the true documentary character of the photos. Within distinctly different constructions of photography we must decipher what choices have been made and why, questioning the character and the truth of the photographs and how their environments change their subjects, complicate them, bolster them.

Graphic Radicals: The Art of World War 3

Final_Poster_Graphic_Radicals

August 11, 2010 – October 31, 2010

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Dr. Allan Antliff

Graphic Radicals was a themed presentation of the work of World War 3 Illustrated, a New York artist collective, from the 1980s to the present day. The art confronted issues such as anti-war protests, squatting in New York, the tragedies of 9-11, racism, prisons and anarchism through a variety of mediums including posters, graphic illustrations, paintings, banners and other media.

Visit the Graphic Radicals exhibition blog 

Cross Connections: Five Decades of Contemporary Art in the Pacific Northwest

James W. Felter, The Russian Panel
James W. Felter, The Russian Panel

January 6 – February 21, 2010

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Cindy Vance and Julia Hulbert

View the online catalogue:

Cross Connections – Catalogue

The University of Victoria’s Legacy Art Gallery and Café presents Cross Connections: Five Decades of Contemporary Art in the Pacific Northwest.

This exhibit features works from UVic’s newly acquired Coast Art Trust Collection. It includes works by the Trust’s founding members, James Felter, Kal Opré and Gregg Simpson, as well as works from each of the five decades represented in the collection.

UVic’s Coast Art Trust Collection comprises more than 100 works by 45 contemporary lower mainland artists. It includes paintings, sculpture, collage, mixed media and photography created in the latter half of the twentieth century. The collection represents a capsule history of Vancouver’s contemporary art scene from the 1960s onwards.

The Coast Art Trust Society recently donated this important historical collection to the University of Victoria’s Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery. The Society was formed as an artist driven enterprise to help preserve BC’s artistic heritage by assembling, maintaining and exhibiting visual art works and archival materials that document artistic activity in the Lower Mainland in the last half of the twentieth century.

Two Fish, Out of Water: Photographs from the Japanese Landscape

Paul Kohl, Unknown
Paul Kohl, Unknown

August 5 – October 5, 2009

Legacy Maltwood (at Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

After three years of exploration in the East, photographer Paul Kohl invites the viewer to discover an estranged view of Japanese landscape.

Kohl, also a professor in art, design and media at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, explores the state that the French call depaysement, the sense the traveler experiences where nothing is as you have known it; where the birdsong, the raked gravel, the telephone’s ring are joltingly exotic. Kohl’s unusual technique employs scanned black and white negatives using Photoshop as a darkroom. He then prints on Japanese paper with an Epson 7600 using pigment inks.

Works from the exhibit are from his recent book, Two Fish, Out of Water, which will be available for sale at the Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery and the University of Victoria Bookstore.

From a Modern Time: The Architectural Photography of Hubert Norbury (Victoria Modern Series)

Hubert Norbury

Hubert Norbury

July 1 – August 23, 2009

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Allan Collier

Imagine Victoria when Bastion Square was a parking lot, UVic had no rabbits and Paul’s Diner served the best plate of fries at any hour. A retro Victoria comes alive through the work of architectural photographer Hubert Norbury, on display at the Legacy Art Gallery and Café this summer.

Norbury succeeded in documenting a building boom that transformed Victoria from a sleepy retreat to a vibrant city, rejuvenated by progressive town planning, a new university campus, and an international airport. His photographs serve as a rich and detailed record of a unique era in Victoria’s architectural history when modern ideas and new building technologies were embraced by its architects and increasingly accepted by the general public.

Images include the construction of car parks, medical clinics, high-rise apartments, hospitals, churches, schools, and educational facilities familiar to any long-term resident of Victoria.

Exhibition catalogue: Victoria Modern 2: From a Modern Time: The Architectural Photography of Hubert Norbury: Victoria in the 50s and 60s (2009)

Similar Exhibitions

Victoria Modern Series Catalogues:

Victoria Modern 1: Investigating Postwar Architecture and Design on Southern Vancouver Island: an introduction (2005)

Victoria Modern 3: The Emergence of Architectural Modernism II; UVic and the Victoria Regional Aesthetic in the Late 1950s and 1960s (2011)

Click here for the Victoria Modern website

Inverting the Lens

inverting lens

June 6 – July 30, 2009

Legacy Maltwood (at Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

Curated by Robbyn Gordon Lanning

This exhibit features photography by the al Manaja’as, a Bedouin family of the Howeitat trib from Humayma, Jordan. In collaboration with UVic Graduate student, Robbyn Gordon Lanning, members of the al Manja’a family take images of their community, family and daily life. These images are key to investigating how the al Manaja’as see photography as a way of documenting their lives and experiences for themselves, their families, and for cultural outsiders.

As residents of Humayma, a region of great historical cultural exchange, members of the al Manaja’a family possess complex relationships with photography. The family has spent many years cultivating personal photographic albums comprised of images made by visiting cultural outsiders, and more recently, have participated as representatives of the Humayma community through photographic exhibits created for local museum spaces. These exhibits, co-currated by Robbyn Gordon Lanning, brought together Ms. Gordon and the al Manaja’a family together through their shared interest in photography. The relationship formed during this initial project acted as a catalyst inspiring their most recent collaborative research.

The photographs featured in this exhibition were created by members of the al Manaja’a family to describe their experiences of community, place, family, relationship and identity as seen through their own lenses.

Hope in Shadows

Valerie Feilding, Big Brother Little Brother
Valerie Feilding, Big Brother Little Brother

May 6 – May 31, 2009

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

The Legacy Art Gallery and Cafe, in partnership with Victoria’s Together Against Poverty and Street Newz, is pleased to present Hope in Shadows, an exhibit that offers a retrospective look into the lives of people living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

In an annual photography contest, started in 2003 by Pivot Legal Society, residents are given disposable cameras and asked to photograph their lives. The result is an exhibit highlighting 20 winning photographs, determined through a community vote. The chosen images challenge stereotypes surrounding issues of poverty, addiction and marginalization.

Conversations About Green

Fiona Spalding-Smith, Secrecy
Fiona Spalding-Smith, Secrecy

April 1 – May 3, 2009

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

A photographic exploration of the coastal rocks of British Columbia by Vancouver photographer Fiona Spalding-Smith.

These photographs speak of hidden visual treasures in our environment and are a tribute to the beauty and solace that nature accords.   – Fiona Spalding-Smith

Icons of a Border: A Photographic Search for Traces in Today’s Berlin

icons of border

 February 26 – March 26, 2009

Legacy Maltwood (at Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

This exhibit highlights the photography exploration of 36 students from the University of Paderborn, who document both the visible and invisible remnants of the Berlin Wall in modern-day Germany. Under the direction of of Prof. Dr. Barbara Becker and photographer Jürgen Spiler at the Institute for Media Science at the University of Paderborn the exhibit came to life in the course of a photo-practical seminar.

Over the years traces of the wall have become scarce as new structures have been built over the wall’s remains. Aided by historical texts and images, the students located forgotten wall fragments, abandoned watch towers and mental traces of a “wall in the mind”. The city has grown more and more together, and many locations where the Wall or the border strip used to run are now buried under buildings and no longer recognizable as what they once were.

Still, the Wall lives on, not only in places “reconditioned” for tourism, at which material remnants of the Berlin Wall can still be viewed, but also in the self-image of the city, its residents and visitors – as an icon of the Cold War, the separation of Germany, and as a symbol and commemoration of personal destinies and suffering.

Starting with historic photos documenting the building of the Wall, and texts in which the Wall finds a voice, the students attempted to ferret out the atmospheres of the past. They researched where and from what perspective these photos had been taken in order to “document” with present photos, taken from a similar perspective, what has remained of these historically significant sites. For this exhibit, these photos generated during the research for remnants of the Wall were mounted on fifteen panels and supplemented with texts authored by the students themselves. Audio recordings, meant to provide an aural background fro the visual reception, can be listened to through stereophonic headphones, permitting a virtual immersion in Berlin, still “coloured” by its past.

 

Woven in Time

August 7 – September 29, 2008

Legacy Maltwood (at Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

This exhibtion contains photographs by UVic student, Ashley Akins. The images document rural life in Peru’s Patakancha Valley, where textile weaving is an integral, but endangered concept.

After volunteering in Peru to brush up on her Spanish, Akins noted that the tourism in the country was both a blessing and a curse. Travellers scoop up their intricate, colourful products but in the haste to sell the work of their elders, younger people are not learning the skills to keep the traditional craft alive. In response to this she create the Mosqoy Foundation (which means “to dream” in the communities’ Indigenous language) which has a three-fold motto-to “educate, preserve and connect”. It accomplishes this through two main projects: the Proyecto Colibri (Project Hummingbird) and Banco de Jovenes (Youth Bank).

Under the former, Akins buys the woven products and sells them at three times the purchase price. One third of the proceeds is returned to the weavers, another third goes to projects chosen by the communities, and another third goes to the Youth Bank to fund 20 students annually to attend post-secondary studies in Cusco, the nearest city.