Greg Staats, What have you seen along the road, 2019

Onenh dwa’ den’ dya – Now let us proceed
Greg Staats

Exhibition Dates: March 29 – April 27, 2019
Opening Reception: March 29, 6 – 8PM
Brunch Talk: March 30, 12 – 2PM

Curated by Leila Timmins

Onenh dwa’ den’ dya – Now let us proceed is an expanded photo-based installation by Hodinǫhsǫ:ni-Kanien’kehá:ka artist Greg Staats. Bringing together new and existing work, the exhibition centres around a Hodinǫhsǫ:ni restorative aesthetic and proposes a process of transformation for reciprocal growth and mental wellness. Foregrounding Staats’ on-reserve lived experience, all of the images were gathered on Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, embodying a continual return and methodology for healing.

Greg Staats, Place 5, 2019.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:
Toronto-based artist Greg Staats, Kanien’kehá:ka (b. Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory) whose lens based and sculptural works combine language, mnemonics and the natural world as an ongoing process of conceptualizing a Hodinǫhsǫ:ni restorative aesthetic that defines the multiplicity of relationships with trauma and renewal, performative burdens and the phenomena of condolence and renewal. Staats’ solo exhibitions include: McMaster Museum of Art, the Kitchener-Waterloo Arts Gallery, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff, Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, Trinity Square Video/Images festival. Group exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Southern Manitoba and Art Gallery of York University. Staats has been Faculty for two Aboriginal Residencies: Archive Restored (2009) and Towards Language (2010) at the Banff Centre. Staats is the recipient of The Duke & Duchess of York Prize in Photography.

Sharona Franklin, New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing, 2018.

New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing
Sharona Franklin

Exhibition Dates: March 29 – April 27, 2019
Opening Reception: March 29, 6 – 8PM

Curated by Steffanie Ling
Presented in partnership with Images Festival

(Vitrines)

New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing is a daily cycling bio-installation, adopting the structure of durational performance and sculpture, meditating on medical treatments which the artist began 20-years ago. Each daily composition exposes disability through a process of bio-ritual: the embodiment of biopharmacology, biocitizenship, and the unveiled autobiography of a daily ritual, private self injection, and the treatment of genetic disease. Within the altars assembled, documented and connected through Instagram, live cells are arranged among unprecious objects. The syringe creates new psychedelia of visual meditations, interjecting social media algorithms, and reclaiming a long-standing alienation. Each image confronts questions around “Who defines celebration while policing the expression of the disabled?” A selection from over a hundred of her images allow us to linger with this experiment in de-stigmatization.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:
Sharona Franklin‘s (b. 1987) work disseminates a personal mythology of gender, class, bio-citizenship, and botany. Her work is reflexive to propaganda, transhumanism and bioethics, working to expand contemporary interpretations of genetic engineering. In 2016 Franklin published a book of visual prose titled Rental Bod(Publication Studio Vancouver, 2016).

Gallery 44 is open Tuesday to Saturday 11AM to 5PM | Free admission
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is a charitable, non-profit, artist-run centre committed to supporting multi-faceted approaches to photography and lens-based media. Founded in 1979 to establish a supportive environment for the development of artistic practice, Gallery 44’s mandate is to provide a context for meaningful reflection and dialogue on contemporary photography.

Gallery 44 is committed to programs that reflect the continuously changing definition of photography by presenting a wide range of practices that engage timely and critical explorations of the medium. Through exhibitions, public engagement, education programs and production facilities our objective is to explore the artistic, cultural, historic, social and political implications of the image in our ever-expanding visual world.

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Maegan Broadhurst
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