I wasn't planning on writing another report on a Contact Photography Festival exhibition but it's like you can't escape them – they're everywhere! And so, as I stumbled around the halls of 401 Richmond, I found myself reflecting on the role of photography as it falls approximately halfway between the vernacular snapshots I addressed a couple weeks ago and the self-consciously capital-A art concepts of last week. Not unsurprisingly, this happened amongst the walls of one of Toronto's dedicated venues for the photographic arts: Gallery 44.
Doug Ischar, MW 19, 1985/2009
Like a lot of people who first clued in to the wonderful world of contemporary art in the eighties/nineties, one of my initial entry points (besides Sonic Youth's album covers) was Nan Goldin. Apart from the musical connection (the Velvet Underground served the same role for a previous generation's exposure to Andy Warhol), the appeal of her work was its representation of the kind of sub-cultural social milieu of outlaws I so wanted to be a part of. Being a straight, white, middle class young man at that time, the only marginal community I could even begin to pretend to be aligned with was that of the queer artists and writers I had already discovered through the usual channels (Genet, Burroughs, Cooper, etc.). My fascination with this world had to do with a desperate need for peers more than lovers, so my blind spot around the AIDS crisis took a while to recede.
Doug Ischar's photographs of gay men hanging out on a concrete waterfront in the mid-eighties remind me of both the appeal of this world and my distance from it. His artistry comes through in the framing and posing of the bodies. His subjects are turned away, focused elsewhere, covering their eyes, or directed towards each other. Combined with their blissful lounging in the sun and their young, perfect bodies, I now find myself idealizing them in another way. From the vantage point of middle age and a modicum of wisdom garnered in the intervening decades, this represented past is Edenic in ways both personal and political. Nostalgia for a life I never had and historical awareness of what is about to come are left to battle it out in the space behind my eye sockets.
Gallery 44: http://www.gallery44.org/
Doug Ischar: Undertow continues until June 16.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Doug Ischar at Gallery 44
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