Sex Life at Galerie SAW Gallery, Ottawa

Galerie SAW Gallery is open again with a strengthened presence and a bracing new show. Curated by Jason St. Laurent, Sex Life: Homoeroticism in Drawing delivers on its promise not to shock or titillate (although the potential for that is abundant), but rather to foster an expanded view of human desire and sexual practices. 

Cindy Baker, Crash Pad, 2017, watercolour on paper

Artists in the show – and featured in a special issue of HB magazine that serves as an exhibition catalogue – include Cindy Baker, Panos Balomenos, Dave Cooper, G.B. Jones, Sholem Krishtalka, Zachari Logan, Kent Monkman, Diane Obomsawin, and Mia Sandhu. They are also joined by a host of even more artists in a series of vitrines that contain additional works – mainly publications such as graphic novels, bandes dessinées, manga, underground comix, and zines. The inclusion of these materials situates the work in the show within a global community. Sex Life imagines a community representing sexual freedom explicitly in contrast to the rise of right-wing conservatism worldwide. The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the August 20 Akimblog.

A Speculative Process: Reading Jayce Salloum’s Mute Pictures

My article on Jayce Salloum's remembering you (mute pictures) is featured in the National Gallery of Canada's Magazine. The early work, completed by Salloum between 1987 and 1988, is included in Photography in Canada 1960–2000, an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada's Canadian Photography Institute and on view at the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ontario. 

Jayce Salloum, Untitled, from remembering you (mute pictures), 1987–88. Gelatin silver print, heightened with paint, 20.3 x 25.2 cm. CMCP Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa © Jayce Salloum

Accompanied by a spoken word soundtrack, the work is comprised of a series of silver gelatin photographs that have been painted to both obscure and isolate elements of their images, inviting the viewer to uncover their meaning. Pages from a book produced in Nazi Germany are the source material for the work, but the manner in which Salloum has treated them renders them less recognizable and disrupts their original message, especially when viewed in combination with the rather oblique commentary provided by the accompanying voiceover. The series engages with the power of photography and the manipulation of propaganda, but by rendering the images more abstract Salloum at once implicates his audience and places them on guard. For the complete text of my article, published on August 14, click here.