Contact Photography Festival is an annual showcase of artists exhibited across Toronto. Public and private galleries, artist-run centres, and public spaces act as hosts for dozens of shows running throughout May.
Steven Beckly, Disarming a Myth, Photograph
We last featured a Contact Festival highlight of Format Member Steven Beckly‘s exhibition, Handy Work, and now offer this narrow best-of list, giving you a chance to see our top choices in Contact’s final weeks!
Laure Tiberghien, Rayon#3, 2018, Unique Chromogenic Print. Courtesy of the artist
Time Capsule – Laure Tiberghien
Davisville Subway Station
As an intervention in an outdoor subway platform, Laure Tiberghien’s Time Capsule is a surprising and welcoming turn to abstraction in the public realm. The work is curated by Gaëlle Morel and highlights Tiberghien’s long-term research and experimentation with cameraless photography, exposing light-sensitive paper directly to natural and artificial light sources.
While the work languishes in the beauty marks of chemistry and accident; burns, light leaks, rips, dust, and oil residue, there is a freedom in the colour washes and smooth transitions of the image. Printed at a large scale to suit the Pattison advertisement encasements, there is a quiet act of resistance in occupying consumerist spaces with Mark Rothko-like abstract expressionist visions. These moments of calm are punctuated by the screeching of the train cars, the bustle of commuters and the ambient sounds of urban nature in the background. As I wandered across both north and southbound train platforms, I couldn’t help but see the sharp details of the train station itself reflected against Tibergien’s expansive colourfield photographs as the yellow chevrons of high visibility architecture reflect and refract against her jewel-like surfaces, unifying the space and work to create something new altogether.
Alison Postma, Dead of Winter, still life, From Series: Tender to the Touch, 2024. courtesy of the artist
Tender to Touch – Alison Postma
Format Member and multi-disciplinary artist Alison Postma’s practice has long looked to the lush strangeness of objects and fragmented bodies through the genre of still life. The solo exhibition at Xpace Cultural Center, Tender to Touch offers a deeper immersive and haptic experience as they combine aspects of woodworking, photography, sculpture and video. The exhibition pushes the boundaries on the surreal, confounding and tenderness of touch.
The gallery is encased in lush satiny peach fabric that is reminiscent of a David Lynchian blue velvet room and offers us absurdist hand-made, with high-technical skill, wooden furniture that endeavours not only to support your body but touch you right back. Postma’s Knob Chair, with its surface covered, enticing you to wrap your fingers around each wooden nub or sink into its gentle support. In contrast of this estranged seating are photographs of soft enigmas full of textural pleasures; a plait of ginger hair, white rose petals dappled with blood, and enamelled teeth on shiny plexiglass surface. There is a spectral and uncanny thread pulled throughout the exhibition as Postma deftly plays with our senses with wildly contrasting textures, colours and materials that remind the viewer of material and subject contrasts found in their dreams.
This is a place – Stephen Attong, Tom Hsu, Brendan Georgo Ko, Eleni Nikoletsos, & Gloria Wong
There is a complex synchronicity in the curatorial choices on display by Avalon Mott in the group exhibition “This is a place” at the plumb. The installation and material choice of prints adhered directly to the wall without frames creates a lovely flow between the different artists’ works without obtrusive presentation methods, the salon-style hang creates a loose and unconventional, democratic approach to presenting photographs, in a similar vein of Wolfgang Tillmans who pioneered this type of installation. . Featuring pieces by Stephen Attong, Tom Hsu, Brendan Georgo Ko, Eleni Nikoletsos, and Gloria Wong, this exhibition offers a space that evokes reflection on what “place” means. As you walk within the exhibition space, mirrors placed in groupings elicit magical moments of connection. The mirrors also act as voids or empty “places” that counterbalance or even reverse the figures, objects and spaces in the photographs.
Christina Leslie, Pinhole #10, 2024, From the series “Pinhole Parishes”
Pinhole Portraits and Places – Christina Leslie
Christina Leslie’s exhibition “Pinhole Portraits and Places” is a refreshing retreat into historical photographic techniques, her images all derived from a retrofitted pinhole camera process means soft focus reigns throughout several bodies of work. Examining themes of decolonization, identity, migration and heritage; the first series of portraits seen on the left wall of Gallery 1 are small, and dark, yet appear, like works of Vermeer, to be lit from within . This series makes visible the glaring absence of Black representation in historical European art and instead offers an intimate presentation of Black community members to challenge the genre’s tropes restricted to white nobility and bourgeois patrons. The details of glistening seashells, trees, massive bridges and small fishing boats are eroded by the pinhole camera, reveling in a dream-like quality.
As an extension of Leslie’s historical and technical investigation, Gallery 2 presents a collection of works from a wide range of artists in SBG’s inventory. Artists like Eugene Atget and Alfred Steiglitz join Sarah Ann Johnson, Larry Towel and April Friges is a delight as.Ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, folded aluminum and a variety of curios are displayed alongside contemporary practicing artists in a cleverly designed exhibition that bridges the past and present.
If you’re in Toronto, we hope you get out to see some of what the 2025 Contact Festival has to offer!
