Critical Distance PROGRAMMING EXHIBITION: On The Surface

TYPOLOGY is pleased to present On The Surface, a Featured Exhibition of the 2016 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, featuring Susana Reisman’s findings from her multi-year investigation into the nature of wood. Encompassing aspects of both drawing and painting even as it foregrounds relationships between sculpture and photography, the exhibition includes a selection of large-scale colour photographs and several freestanding wood sculptures.

In her surprisingly painterly photographs of industrial wood finishing rooms, Reisman makes visible, through the material’s apparent absence, the many layers, and intensive labour, that must be applied to re-surface wood products for commercial purposes. Conversely, her exquisitely tactile sculptures, left in various states of fabrication and finish, evince the vivid and varied marks of her experimental method of “drawing” into their surfaces with a table saw. Where the photographs speak to processes of surfacing in wood’s absence, the wood sculptures make present a new awareness of surface by virtue of the tangible marks made upon them, a visible index of the artist’s manual explorations on wood to varying depths and degrees.

As a meditation on both formal and conceptual interfaces between wood’s multiple planes, On The Surface is a visual delight which belies the artist’s deeper concern and ambivalence toward humanity’s desire for perfection as expressed in our fraught relationship with the natural world. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new catalogue featuring an original curatorial essay and full documenation of the show.

On The Surface is a Featured Exhibition of the 2016 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

Please join us for a public opening reception with the artist on
Saturday, May 7th, from 6–9 pm

Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.

TYPOLOGY
No. 302, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto, ON M6J 2W5
See Google map of location

About the Artist:

Susana Reisman was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1977. She received a BA in Economics from Wellesley College, Boston (1999) and an MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2005). After teaching photography for a number of years, Reisman now dedicates her time to making art and running Circuit Gallery. She lives and works in Toronto.

Recent solo and group exhibitions include Productive Displacement, a series of billboards curated by Bonnie Rubenstein for the 2015 CONTACT Photography Festival; Standardizing Nature: Trees, Wood, Lumber (2014) at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto; Unsettled Primaries (2014), curated by Mariangeles Soto-Diaz for the Torrance Art Museum, California; Immoderation (2014), curated by Megan Press for the Living Arts Centre, Mississauga; Micah Lexier: More Than Two (2013), curated by Micah Lexier for The Power Plant, Toronto; Flash Forward Festival 2013, outdoor exhibition at Fairmont Battery Wharf, Boston; Objects in Mirrors May Appear Closer (2013), UNO St. Claude Gallery, New Orleans; and Like-Minded (2012), curated by Micah Lexier for the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) was founded in 2013 under our former name, TYPOLOGY. Established as a not-for-profit space devoted to curatorial and artistic experimentation, we devoted our first three years to providing opportunities for curators and artists to mount fully realized exhibitions within a critical framework. In 2016, we relaunched under our new name (CDCC) with a new Board of Directors and a commitment to meet the need, voiced by local and national curators, for a truly vital curatorial community—one that both supports emerging and underrepresented curators, and advances curatorial practice and inquiry. On the Surface took place in CDCC’s exhibition space in 2016 under our former name, TYPOLOGY, and was curated by CDCC’s Founding Director, Shani K Parsons.

The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council for this exhibition.

image: Susana Reisman, Respirator masks (Custom Prototypes), Toronto, 2015