The Painted Photograph
5 May to 19 November 2006
CMCP Main level

This exhibition presents the beautiful works of David Bierk, Sarah Nind, and Jaclyn Shoub that mix photography and painting. Their use of both media expresses contemporary concerns about the relationship between ideas of nature and culture, originality and appropriation, and tradition and modernity. Sarah Nind understands the photograph as an accurate, albeit static, reproduction of reality, one that must be augmented in order to convey ideas of a more spiritual nature. In the work of Jaclyn Shoub, painterly processes provide a way to intervene with imagery in order to create a more personal statement about the subject matter. The anxiety and sense of loss linked to technology is explored in the work of David Bierk. By incorporating direct references to art history and painting, Bierk offers the viewer a sense of tradition and lasting cultural values. The photograph, as a modern technology and image-making device, therefore, is in direct dialogue with its pictorial antecedents.

David Bierk
Petrified Tree, California 1989
Oil on photographs on canvas
133.4 x 91.4 cm
Collection of Elizabeth Bierk
Photo: Michael Cullen, Trent Photographics

The Street
Robert Frank, Tom Gibson, Dave Heath, Michael Schreier, Robert Walker, Justin Wonnacott
5 May to 19 November 2006
CMCP Main level

Since the production of Daguerre’s view of Boulevard du Temple in 1839, the street has been seen by photographers both as a public space where signs of culture proliferate and as a private space where identities are played out. This selection of photographs from the collection focuses on the shifting boundaries between private and public.

Organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Robert Walker
Children's Zoo, Central Park, New York 1979
Azo dye print
60 x 40.2 cm
Collection Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography