Working Images

Carte grise à Carole Condé et Karl Beveridge

Shelly Bahl (New York / Toronto), Julie Faubert (Montreal), Suzy Lake (Toronto),
Loraine Leeson (England), Allan Sekula (Los Angeles), James Williams
(England) et Carole Condé et Karl Beveridge (Toronto)

Opening on Thursday, April 16 at 5 :00 p.m., in the presence of the artists.

On Wednesday, April 29 at 7:00 p.m., Dazibao and Cinema Politica present the films Workingman’s Death (Michael Glawoger) and Still Lives (Anna Sarkissian), two documentaries addressing the question of labour.
J.A. DeSève Cinema (Concordia), J.W. McConnell (Library),
local LB-125, 1400 de Maisonneuve West.
www.cinemapolitica.org/node/807

As a complement to the exhibition Working Images, Dazibao and Fillip (Vancouver) are publishing an exchange between authors Rosemary Donegan and John O'Brian, that addresses the questions raised by Condé and Beveridge in the context of the exhibition. Come meet Jordan Strom, Editor of Fillip, at Dazibao on the occasion of the opening. The text by Donegan and O'Brian will be available exclusively on Fillip's website (http://fillip.ca/) as of April 16 and will be published in Fillip 10, available this summer.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) welcomes you to the launch of Fillip 9 and to a talk by Jordan Strom, Editor of Fillip, on April 19 2009, at 3 p.m.

On the occasion of the opening of Working Images, Dazibao will also launch Condé and Beveridge : Class Works, directed by Bruce Barber and published by NSCAD Press.

The exhibition runs from April 16 to May 30, 2009.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, from noon to 5 :00 p.m.

Each year, Dazibao invites an artist for whom the image is central to his creative practice, to curate a Carte grise in the form of an exhibition and related events. The artist selects work by other artists susceptible of creating, in such a way, a kind of resonance box around his practice – a dialogue that allows us to get a better sense of where his work draws its ideas. Over the past decade, Raymonde April, Gilbert Boyer, Geneviève Cadieux, Pierre Dorion, Evergon, Raymond Gervais, Guy Maddin, Lani Maestro, Jocelyn Robert and Michael Snow, among others, have curated a Carte grise. This year, this mandate has been given to Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. Condé and Beveridge are artists of international stature whose work is based on the idea of the representation of work and its relation to identity in the context of what is called the information society. Under this premise, Condé and Beveridge have brought together the work of several artists, in which various social perceptions of labour are examined.

Pride in one’s work—pride in work well done, the feeling of contributing to society’s development and to the collective good and, increasingly, pride in money matters—is a part of our identity. And yet this pride is very rarely expressed publicly and so little depicted that it is culturally invisible. The pieces included in Working Images engage a discussion, each in its own way, around the work we carry out and its representation. Whether the pieces shown contextualise a situation (Julie Faubert, Allan Sekula, James Williams) or involve a mise en scène (Shelly Bahl, Suzy Lake, Loraine Leeson, Condé and Beveridge), they bring work face to face with its social perception and embody the very paradigm of work.

For their part of the show, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge present Salt of the Earth, a recent work illustrating the difficult and sometimes rudimentary conditions to which migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean are subjected as they arrive by thousands each year to work on Canadian farms. In her pictures, taken in a Toronto airport, Shelly Bahl juxtaposes the desire for personal transformation, at the root of mass tourism, with the realities of immigration and border control. Loraine Leeson brings cultures together by means of an imposing mural created in collaboration with the teenaged students and a teacher in an East London school. Suzy Lake, in a gesture suggestive of Cinderella, puts herself in the frame, sweeping the ground around her. Absorbed by this task, she transcends mere subordination and addresses the very experience of work.

In an approach closer to documentary, James Williams’ photographs depict the landscapes and steel workers of Hamilton, Ontario in a constantly-transformed industrial environment. Julie Faubert is drawn to transformed sites, in this case a textile factory that has been converted into artists’ studios, and to the immense distance separating these two worlds. Finally, Allan Sekula presents Tsukiji, a video on the world’s largest fish market, in Tokyo, which reveals a system that has reached the end of its great enterprises through the uniformity of its practices and by exhausting local specificities.

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge live and work in Toronto. For more than thirty years they have collaborated with trade unions and community organisations to create their photographic mises en scène. Their work has been shown in union halls, art galleries and museums both in Canada and abroad. The Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario recently organised a retrospective of their work.

Shelly Bahl is a visual and media artist who lives in New York and Toronto. For over fifteen years, her work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in North America and abroad. She is a founding member of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Collective) and ZEN-MIX 2000: Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network. She has worked in various arts organisations and taught in various educational institutions.

Julie Faubert lives and works in Montreal. Her work has been shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Quebec and the rest of Canada, in Portugal and in Spain. She holds a master’s degree in visual and media art from UQÀM and is presently carrying out research for a Ph.D. on sound installations in urban environments.

Suzy Lake was born in Detroit and lives and works in Toronto. She was one of the first women artists in Canada to take up performance art, video and photography to explore issues around gender, the body and identity. In 1983, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography mounted a major retrospective of her work. She is one of the 119 women artists whose work was included in the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution 1965-1980, which was organised by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and toured to several North American cities.

Loraine Leeson is an artist and a researcher at the University of East London. She founded cSPACE, an organisation which uses art as a motor for social change and offers support to various communities. Since the 1970s, she has worked in a variety of communities and for a number of organisations, including the Docklands Community Poster Project and The Art of Change. A retrospective of her work has been touring Europe and North America since 2005.

Allan Sekula is a photographer, author and critic living in Los Angeles. His work has been seen in a number of solo and group exhibitions around the world. He is the author of several influential books about photography, including Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983 and Fish Story. He currently teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

James Williams was born in the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario. His work focuses on issues around industry, work and the working class and has been exhibited in Canada and abroad. In 1998, the Art Gallery of Hamilton organised a retrospective of his work. He currently lives on Salford, Great Britain, where he teaches photography at the University of Bolton.