Critical Distance PROGRAMMING EXHIBITION: On The Surface

Artist(s): Susana Reisman
Curator(s): Shani K Parsons

On The Surface is 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 is accompanied by a new catalogue featuring an original curatorial essay and full documenation of the show.

Programs, Events, and Public Art

Exhibition Opening with the Artist
Saturday, May 7th, 2016
6:00 – 9:00 pm: Exhibition opening to be held with the artist. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome!

Publications

On The Surface: Susana Reisman. Exhibition Catalogue.

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 Surfacetook place in CDCC’s exhibition space in 2016 under our former name, TYPOLOGY, originally located at 180 Shaw Street, No. 302, Artscape Youngplace, Toronto.

On The Surface is a Featured Exhibition of the 2016 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council for this exhibition.

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