Where Separate Parts Join

February 20 – June 21, 2009
RBC Lobby, Eric Harvie Theatre

Curator: Natalia Lebedinskaia
Opening Reception: February 20, 4-6 p.m.

Charles Gagnon
Bank Vault with Truck and Man, 1973
Black and white photograph
Collection of The Banff Centre

A vacant office lobby decorated with Christmas ornaments, a window that separates inside from outside, a neighbourhood game of lawn bowling: all the photographs in this exhibition depict the thin boundaries that separate one thing from another. Like the belief that toys come to life when nobody is watching, the ordinary spaces pictured here reveal another dimension when they are without a human presence.

The majority of these works were acquired through The Banff Purchase in 1979 when 153 photographs entered the collection. The sheer volume of works signifies the emerging importance of photography in the field of contemporary art. They reveal the fading influence of the National Film Board’s Still Photo Division, which brought social documentary photography to the Canadian public from 1940s until early 1970s through newspaper stories, books, and exhibitions. Following in the footsteps of painting, sculpture, and architecture of the time, they use Conceptual and Minimalist strategies, while combining them with classical black-and-white street photography.

Rather than calling for social change, they point to a necessity to acknowledge the tension where separate parts join, while paying close attention to moments that reveal the aesthetics of the subtle everyday mechanisms of control and order. At times like these, the narrow spaces created by the boundaries come to life and celebrate the minute joining of incompatible opposites.