Annual Report 2008-2009 - National Gallery of Canada

“We live in a time of the created image –
if you do not create your own, someone will create it for you”
– photographer David Neel (Kwagiutl)
Canadian Museum
of Contemporary
Photography
In landmark exhibition,
Aboriginal artists reclaim the power of the
portrait
Much has been said about the power of portraiture. When the
former subject of the portrait takes the camera, that power is
turned on its head. This is the effect accomplished by the star
photographers featured in Steeling the Gaze: Portraits by
Aboriginal Artists. Organized by the CMCP in collaboration with
the Gallery’s new Indigenous curator-in-residence and on display
in fall 2008 and winter 2009, Steeling the Gaze represents
the first time the CMCP and the Gallery have worked together
on an exhibition of the contemporary photographs of
Aboriginal artists. The exhibition paid tribute to prominent
Aboriginal artists – Arthur Renwick, Shelley Niro, Dana Claxton,
and Jeff Thomas among them – who turn the “European cultural
convention” of the portrait on their own people,
reclaiming the image of Indigenous people from its lengthy
historical appropriation.
Featured as a “critic’s pick” in the Ottawa Citizen as well as on CBC Radio and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network,
Steeling the Gaze was not the only CMCP exhibition to tackle significant issues and garner attention. Imaging a Shattering
Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate, sponsored by Oakland University Art Gallery out of Rochester,
Michigan and CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival, combined the work of major Canadian and American photographers and
drew national press coverage.
CMCP is especially proud of its touring program, which brings exhibitions built around its collections to communities across
the country. Among these was Nicolas Baier: Pareidolia, a solo exhibition on the Montreal photographer that originated with
the Musée régional de Rimouski and was co-organized by CMCP and a team of institutions comprising the Museum of
Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, St. Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du
Québec. Launched in Rimouski in fall 2008, Pareidolia will travel to museums across the country before coming to rest at CMCP
in 2010. Its centrepiece is Baier’s epic work Vanitas, which has been described as a “masterwork of monumental proportions.”
Also noteworthy was the appearance of The Street, featuring 35 photographs from CMCP’s collection, at the Buhler Gallery
inside the St. Boniface General Hospital in Manitoba – the first hospital art gallery in the country.
Michael Semak,
Ischia Island (off Naples, Italy)
(detail), 1961. CMCP © CARCC 2009
18 Highlights and Achievements