Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography

Beau Gomez, Freak by nature, from the series Sometimes I wish the mirror would ask how I’m doing, archival print, 2023.

Proof 30
Beau Gomez, Michaëlle Sergile, Morgan Sears-Williams

Exhibition Dates: June 7 – July 6, 2024
Artist Walkthrough: June 7, 2024, 5:00pm
Opening Reception: June 7, 2024, 6:00 – 8:00pm

Proof is Gallery 44’s annual group exhibition of work by emerging Canadian artists, reflecting a range of current concerns and practices in contemporary photography and lens-based media.

“Beau Gomez, Morgan Sears-Williams and Michaëlle Sergile create a visual lexicon of image-making practices through the complexity of desire, the depth of touch and the possibility of gesture. In Proof 30, they beckon viewers to orient around images queerly—to look closer and slower, to feel the image and to foreground the body as sources of profound wisdom.” – excerpt from Otherwise Sensibilities

For more information read Otherwise Sensibilities, an essay by curator, researcher and writer Sarah Edo.

Proof is often one of the first exhibitions in a professional context for an emerging artist. Past exhibitions have featured work by Kotama Bouabane, Leila Fatemi, Isabelle Hayeur, Anique Jordan, Laurie Kang, Germaine Koh, Luther Konadu, Meryl McMaster, Karice Mitchell, Elise Rasmussen and Althea Thauberger.

Proof 30 is generously supported by the Fabio Mascarin Foundation, a partnership with a shared commitment to advance the careers of emerging artists.

Images (left to right): Morgan Sears-Williams, infinite kiss, 16mm film still, 2023. Michaëlle Sergile, Untitled, still from the series Gesture: Body Movements in Political Discourse, video, 2020-2024.

Beau Gomez is a lens-based artist whose practice is informed by ideas, challenges and conversations around cross-cultural narratives as they relate to positions of community, and of otherness. He is interested in activating storytelling and the realm of possibility it offers: as a vehicle for illustrating memory, as an operative point of tension and affect, and as a radical exercise in holding space. Traversing visual and verbal material, his work is grounded in image-making as a conduit between individual and collective history, giving permission to shared means of learning, nurturing and renewal.

Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities—and more specifically of women—or communities living in diverse intersections, through weaving. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race.‍

Morgan Sears-Williams (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultivator based in Toronto and Vancouver. Sears-Williams’s practice embraces an embodied and personal reflection on the body and queer community while speaking to larger structures of power, oppression and social constructions of space. Investigating the use of analog film as a form of projected image and as a sculptural material she considers space and queerness through analog technologies, creating experimental topographies through photographic film and moving images. Bridging eco-processing, experimental film and queer history (both personal and political) she aims to create intimate experiences for viewers to expand their ideas of queer space and time.

Catalogue covers from Proof 1 – Proof 19, 1994–2010.

Proof Yearbook

Exhibition Dates: June 7 – July 6, 2024
(Vitrines)

2024 marks the 30th edition of Proof—Gallery 44’s annual emerging artist exhibition, established in 1994—in celebration, Proof Yearbook shares the program’s legacy and archive on view in the Vitrines and online. The exhibition began as Latent Images in 1987, pulling emerging artists’ works from a general call for submissions. In 1993, Gallery 44 held its first call specifically soliciting submissions from emerging artists. Met with an overwhelming response, the gallery’s Exhibition Selection Committee created a non-thematic, national forum to platform artists working in unconventional materials and photographic processes to reflect current concerns and practices of emerging Canadian photographers.

Thirty years later, Proof remains true to its roots.

The archival project includes exhibition catalogues and documentation from 1987–2024 and a preface interweaving an introductory text written in 1999 by Sara Angelucci, Gallery 44’s Executive Director at the time (and Proof 5 alumna) and response by current Executive Director Alana Traficante ruminating on the program’s lasting impact on emergent image-making practices.

Proof Yearbook was researched, digitized, and curated by Exhibitions and Publications Coordinator, Caeden Wigston.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is an artist-run centre committed to supporting diverse approaches to photographic and image-based practices through exhibitions, education programs and facilitating artistic production. Gallery 44 provides space and context for meaningful dialogue between artists and publics. Together, we offer an entry point to explore the artistic, cultural, historic, social and political implications of the image in our ever-expanding visual world.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8
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Maegan Broadhurst
Head of Communications and Development
maegan@gallery44.org
416.979.3941