Open Call for Submissions:

Reality Vanishing In Plain Sight: A Curated Show of Altered Images

Deadline: Saturday, September 11, 11 pm
Exhibition: October 2 — 20, 2019

An Open Call for Submissions for photographs that make use of the altered or fabricated image for a Juried Exhibition: Reality Vanishing In Plain Sight: A Curated Show of Altered Images.

Questions of authenticity have always been at the core of photography ethos. Since its inception, artists have challenged the medium’s inherent exactitude by exploring its ability to alter and manipulate. From William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature to Gustave Le Gray’s use of bi-packed negatives of sea and sky in Mediterranean Sea, Sète, No. 18, (1857), to Julia Margaret Cameron’s elaborate Pre-Raphaelite constructions, photographers have embraced the medium as a conceptual art form. Consequently, photography has become defined not simply as a quotation of the world, but rather a visual reconstruction of reality—a simulacrum with a difference.

Half a century later, John Heartfield, Man Ray, and the Russian Constructivists, forever altered by revolution and World War I, created photomontages, collages, and Rayographs that provided a new visual vocabulary for a new world, a new cognitive reading of the real.

Since the 1960s, photographers set out to anatomize, undermine, reconfigure, and deploy the photographic image, to expand the range of its signification altogether. In both digital and analogue forms, these postmodern strategies of appropriation and manipulation have led to endless expressive possibilities to create images that provide a deeper understanding.

Artists are invited to submit up to three images per $50 submission that may have begun as simple photos but now takes the viewer beyond the photographic image to unpack hidden elements and meanings. Preference will be given to works that provide rearrangement/modification of the elements of the photograph to show an artist’s vision.

“The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality.” Jerry N. Uelsmann

Submission Form

The Promise of Sekishu Washi; Juried Open Call Exhibition


Deadline: Monday, September 30, 11 pm
Exhibition: October 23 – November 3, 2019

The Japanese Paper Place (JPP) and Propeller Gallery invites artists to experiment with Sekishu Washi, (a traditional Japanese paper) and participate in the exhibition at Propeller Art Gallery.

Sekishu Washi (a traditional Japanese paper) has been produced by hand for over 1400 years on the west coast of Japan in what is now Shimane (formerly Sekishu) Prefecture. This labour- intensive tradition, using renewable 100% Japanese kozo bark, has been designated by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Property and its continuity severely threatened for many reasons.

Though it may look fragile, Sekishu Washi is surprisingly versatile. Strong, translucent, absorbent, malleable and warm to the touch, the paper’s potential is endless. The same paper can be drawn on, painted with watercolour, gouache, acrylic or encaustic, dyed, layered, stitched or printed on both sides by any print media. The translucence of Sekishu Washi can be showcased by letting light pass through it and its malleability put to use by constructing a three-dimensional form.

Curator: Nancy Jacobi (See Toronto Star article on Jacobi 06, ’19)

Jurors: Naoko Matsubara, Cybèle Young, David Kaye

Submission Form

To familiarize artists with the Sekishu Washi paper, a workshop entitled: The Promise of Sekishu Washi will be held at the Japanese Paper Place on August 14, 2–5 pm.
$50 / $40 Propeller Members (+HST).

For more information on this exciting workshop and to sign up or send a request to washi@japanesepaperplace.com or call 416-844-4981.

Propeller Art Gallery
30 Abell Street
Toronto, ON  M6J 0A9
416-504-7142
propellerartgallery.ca
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