No Justice, No Peace: From Ferguson to Toronto:Power to the People, the Ryerson Image Centre’s multi-part endeavour presenting “photography and video of repression and black protest” is a timely affair despite its historical rooting, given both the depressing litany of black people in America killed in recent years by law enforcement and the attitude of the current occupant of the White House (“It’s Black History Month, so this is our little breakfast,” President Trump said as he kicked off an event last week, before proclaiming that celebrated 19th-century black abolitionist Frederick Douglass had done “an amazing job.”) The RIC’s main show centres around the 1971 Attica prison riot, a landmark in civil protest and image-making both. At the Gladstone Hotel, it brings it right up to date with images made by Jalani Morgan, Zun Lee and Nation Cheong, three Toronto photographers deeply engaged with a rising protest movement in the here and now. Case in point: Lee’s images of the Ferguson riots following the shooting death of Michael Brown by police in 2014, which stoked the engine of the Black Lives Matter movement — a movement our own premier, Kathleen Wynne, found herself having to answer to, as Morgan’s stirring image makes clear.
- At the Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. W., until Feb. 26
Tau Lewis: Cyphers, Tissues, Blizzard, Exile: Weather plays a part in Tau Lewis’s new solo exhibition or, more specifically, has refused to. In the backyard of 8-11 Gallery on Spadina Ave, a cinder-block shack with a corrugated plastic roof, its exterior walls painted bright lavender and aquamarine, was expected to be covered in snow by now and provide a real-world juxtaposition to the internal tensions of Lewis’s hybrid identity. Lewis, 23, grew up in Chinatown; her mother is white, her father Jamaican and black. Her work here represents a hunter-gatherer approach to reconciling those two worlds, on her own terms. Collecting bits and pieces from the streets around her studio, Lewis merges castoffs with an intensely personal sense of self to reflect the patchy nature of memory, identity, and carving one’s space in an increasingly complex and fragmented world. About that shack, minus its snow: the colour and material are typical of the kinds of shelters found in Jamaica, half of what Lewis calls home; inside, a rough-hewn effigy of her childhood self sits patiently in a rocking chair, waiting for the snow to fall.
- At 8-11 Gallery, 233 Spadina Ave., until Feb. 25
Opening
Felix Kalmenson, As Always: Kalmenson wears the mileage of his youthful ambition like a badge of honour; not yet 30, it feels like he’s been around forever, showing from Shanghai to Berlin and everywhere in between. He’s also in a group show at Trinity Square Video, of movement and dwelling right now, but As Always brings it home, in a manner befitting his peripatetic nature. Kalmenson, who was born in Leningrad and immigrated to Toronto as a child, went back last year for a residency, though it was to Saint Petersburg (Glasnost restored its historic name in 1991, when Kalmenson was 4 and already in Toronto), further complicating a mission to reassemble the scattered fragments of his bifurcated identity. The resulting video and installation project, for which Kalmenson gathered bits and pieces from flea markets near his toddler-era neighbourhood in an effort to cobble together an early childhood he can barely grasp, bundles up both the dislocations of displacement and the challenge it presents to building identity; critical, in this era of millions of refugees. But it also suggests, more broadly, how memory is less held than constructed, especially in this era of so much falseness — a sad reality no less true to this moment than it was in the death rattle of Soviet Russia.
- Opening Thursday, 6 to 8 p.m. at Pari Nadimi Gallery, 254 Niagara St.
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