Danielle Goshay: Together We Name the Shadow

Curated by Darian Razdar

Danielle Goshay, Water Photogram, 2024

Danielle Goshay: Together We Name the Shadow

October 29 – November 26, 2026
Opening Reception: October 29, 6 – 9pm
CONTACT Photobook Lab, Toronto

The opaque is not obscure, but it may be and can be accepted as such.
– Édouard Glissant

Together We Name the Shadow gathers a selection of Danielle Goshay’s photograms in the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition. The exhibition considers the possibilities of image-making inherent to the chemical photographic process — possibilities foreclosed by capitalism, yet repeatedly re-engaged by experimental artists like Goshay.

What distinguishes this exhibition is the artist’s unconventional practice, which she has developed over decades of intensive experimentation with physical and mystical processes. Goshay’s photograms refuse to provide viewers with easily knowable, comfortable, or reproducible images.

Within the artist’s refusal lives a vindication of the abstract and unknowable. It is on this opaque terrain where the viewer meets the artist’s foggy, leaky, charred, and broken images. The aesthetically challenging work speaks to Édouard Glissant’s idea of opacity as reverence for difference in the face of unknowing.

Exhibition Catalogue designed by Eric Francisco, published by Reflex Edition (Toronto, 2026)

Together We Name the Shadow includes a selection of Goshay’s original photograms and fine art reproductions framed and mounted to the gallery’s walls, as well as examples of Goshay’s wheatpaste method of preparing and adhesing prints directly to surfaces. Visitors have the chance to purchase a copy of the exhibition catalogue, designed by Eric Francisco and published by Reflex Editions, which includes a poster to wheatpaste, extending the exhibition from inside the gallery to the wider urban context. An integral extension of the exhibition featuring an expanded selection of Goshay’s photograms alongside critical writing around Goshay’s practice by the exhibition’s curator, Darian Razdar, and art historian, Nicholas di Benedetto.

Together We Name the Shadow is Goshay’s first solo gallery show after over a decade of working and exhibiting internationally. As the artist is one of few Black women at the forefront of abstract and Alternative Process photography in Canada, Together We Name the Shadow is a significant milestone for the photographic community.

Danielle Goshay, Water Photogram, 2025

About the Artist

Danielle Goshay is a Toronto-based image maker specializing in experimental digital and film photography, alternative process, and wheat paste street art. Goshay studied photography at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, a community-run media arts centre which provided certificate programs in experimental photographic methods from 1971 to 2019.

Studying photograms and scanography under Sue Abramson, Goshay developed a practice of exploring the physicality of image-making with creative freedom, which she would return to in 2019 under the mentorship of Jeremy Lynch. Over the past six years of dedicated experimentation, Goshay has pushed the edges of the technique and grown recognition for her advancements in alternative process photography.

Since moving to Toronto in 2014, Goshay has been an active member of the area’s photography community — serving on Gallery 44’s Board of Directors from 2022 to 2025, coordinating annual member exhibitions, as well as co-founding the Hamilton-based Pasteplatzer collective and Wheat Paste anti Gallery.

Goshay’s images have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, and abroad — such as at Gallery 44 (Toronto), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh), Rooney’s (Hamilton), Rochester Contemporary Art Center (New York), Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and University of Salford (UK). Her self-publishing projects include AlderIdhees (2022, 2025) and wheat paste street art (2022, PastePlatzer). Goshay’s work has also been published in Carnation (2024, v.3), Associations (2023, v.1), Frank (2023, v.1), Agon Journal (2021, v.0), and KNACK magazine (2021, v.78), among others.

About the Curator

Darian Razdar is a writer, artist, and independent scholar. His practice is embodied, ecological, collaborative, and research-intensive — most often working with poetry, image, textile, and print. With roots in the Great Lakes and Caspian Sea basins, his practice is currently based in Toronto and Paris.

Razdar is an active writer with an evolving publishing history in poetry and criticism. His chapbooks include Edge Theory (Toronto: silverfish, 2025); Morning Poems (Toronto San Press, 2023); and Counter-Map: A Poetics of Place (Toronto: Reflex Urbanism, 2022). His poetry was recently published in the collaborative artists’ book Nightwalker alongside photography by Eric Francisco (Toronto: Reflex Editions, 2025). Razdar’s writing is also found in Commo Mag; Peripheral Review; C Mag; Vallum: Contemporary Poetry; The Blasted Tree; PM Press; Pleasure Dome; The Asian Canadian Living Archive; Upping the Anti; Hearth Garage; Toronto Star; Progressive City; and Metropolitics.

Crucial to Razdar’s practice is the performance of creative field research in which he experiments with collaborative and embodied methods of learning with place. His field work in Paris for Locating Belleville (2018) inspired his Community Power Mapping workshop series, which he facilitated for over 300 participants in 4 countries between 2018 and 2022. Critically re-thinking these projects, Razdar created the workshops Poetics of Place in 2022 and a landscape hosts something in 2024.

CONTACT Photobook Lab
80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 205
Toronto, ON M5V2J4
contactphoto.com
info@contactphoto.com
+1 416-539-9595

Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm

Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair accessible at street level via the Spadina Avenue entrance, and then by taking the elevator to the 2nd floor.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their support in bringing Danielle Goshay: Together We Name the Shadow to the public.