Through Lines
Koffler Gallery (Toronto, Ontario)
Curated by Noa Bronstein

Lise Beaudry, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Leila Fatemi, Maria Hupfield, Raafia Jessa, Nadia Myre
September 13 – November 25, 2018

Through lines brings together the works of seven artists that challenge notions of redaction, tackling its typical devices of shredding, blacking out, editing and covering up. Each project featured in this exhibition engages a restorative gesture that speaks to the ways in which history and memory are conceptualized within a contemporary context. Rather than considering redaction simply as a bureaucratic tool or an outcome of state control, these specific approaches enable new forms of knowledge production and remembering, both politically and personally. Contemplating alternative legibilities that might emerge through redaction, the exhibition highlights the spaces of inquiry revealed through acts of obstruction.

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Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

"Lise Beaudry likewise examines the ways in which personal images can be put toward other uses by reconstituting intimate family photographs. Posthumously collaborating with her deceased father as the record-keeper who documented their family life throughout the course of his own, she sutures together various images from both his and her archives, enlarges the whole, and then overlays shredded images, creating a disorienting blurring of several personal snapshots. In Maurice (2018) a bikini-clad, toddler-aged Beaudry is shown beside her son while her partner appears at the opposite end of the frame. Paired with this work is a stack of 1,600 photos that form one complete image in Chez Sandy(2018). The images are created through a time-consuming technique that separates each single row of pixels from one original photograph, stretches them into an 8 x 8 inch image and prints them individually. Layering the individual prints in sequential order reconstructs the original image along the side of the stack as opposed to the surface of each photograph. Beaudry’s act of blurring past and present and two- and three-dimensional forms calls into question the decisive moment and how we define photography. Beaudry’s ongoing work of redacting her own images allows photography to persist as a complex collaboration between many makers and viewers. In re-assigning the value proposition of images away from singular photographers and moments in time, this iterative project acknowledges that a more expansive definition of photography has the potential to operate more openly." Noa Bronstein 

Full essay is available in online publication THROUGH LINES

Maurice, 80x105in, Inkjet prints and strips, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Chez Sandy, 13x8x8in, 1,600 inkjet prints, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Merci au Conseil des arts du Canada pour leur appui financier pour ce projet.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts for their financial support. ​