CANADA NOW features works by ten emerging and mid-career artists from across the country who employ photographic media to engage with issues of identity and belonging. Their work represents diverse lived experiences, highlighting various aspects of visibility and resilience. Traditional approaches to portraiture are displayed alongside poetic works, some using the trope of the fragment, trace, or spirit to communicate narratives of embodiment and displacement.

I Wish U Were Here (2021) by Zachary Ayotte (Edmonton) is a meditation on the artist’s experience as a gay man travelling through the Western United States with his partner. Other series similarly exploring personal identity and experience through the lens of performative self-portraiture include akunnirun kuupak (2019) by Kablusiak (Calgary), in which the artist adopts the dead-pan guise of a ghost against the backdrop of their ancestral home to address themes of diaspora and displacement. Rebecca Bair (Vancouver) likewise engages with her position as a Black woman in Reach & Coil (Découpé) (2021), a unique, mural-sized polyptych specifically commissioned for The Image Centre. A second commission presented is a new work in the series A Slippery Place (2019–21) by Séamus Gallagher (Halifax), who poses among elaborate photo-sculptural sets and costumes inspired by drag culture and video game aesthetics.

Group identity is a unifying theme of works including Figure as Index (2018–21) by Luther Konadu (Winnipeg), an evolving investigation of the self in the context of the artist’s community of individuals from the African diaspora. In Queer Portraits (2012–19), JJ Levine (Montreal) fashions revealing and intimate portrayals of loved ones in carefully staged domestic settings. Female and gender-non-conforming friends and family likewise serve as subjects for Kali Spitzer (Vancouver) in An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance (2015–18), whose arresting portraits are based on tintypes and are accompanied by oral histories. Morris Lum (Toronto) engages with his Chinese diaspora community through portraits of places rather than people, in an ongoing study of the vernacular spaces of Chinatowns across North America.

In Isolation Photographs (2020–21), Alyssa Bistonath (Toronto) engages with her community in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the people and environments in her life. Also a response to the artist’s experience of the pandemic is From Walking so Much in Circles, I Will End up Making a Sphere (2020) by Isabel M. Martínez (Toronto)—created using experimental photographic techniques without the use of a camera, these “sun/moon drawings” reference the cyclical and uncertain nature of history.

The exhibition showcases a selection from the 60 works that join the collection of The Image Centre through the support of the Canada Now Photography Acquisition Initiative, conceived in the spring of 2020 by photographer Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas Metivier Gallery in response to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadian artists. Proceeds from the sale of Burtynsky’s portfolio Natural Order were designated to The Image Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in support of the acquisition of works by twenty Canadian artists, ten to be selected by each institution. The Image Centre’s exhibition will be followed by a presentation of the AGO’s related acquisition in 2023.

• Alyssa Bistonath
• Kali Spitzer
• Morris Lum
• JJ Levine
• Luther Konadu
• Isabel M. Martínez
• Rebecca Bair
• Zachary Ayotte