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INSTILLS

ADAM KRAWESKY

CONTACT TORONTO PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

May 1 – 15, 2009

INSTILLS

PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY presents ADAM KRAWESKY in instills at the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival

May 1 to 15, 2009

Project Launch:
Friday, May 1, 2009
9 a.m.

Launch Point:
1024 Queen Street West
Toronto Canada


PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY is pleased to present an innovative new project by Toronto photo-artist ADAM KRAWESKY as part of the gallery’s participation in the 2009 CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival. Entitled instills, the exhibition is a series of public street installations where photographs in situ are seen for the second and first time. The project launches on Friday, May 1 at 9 a.m. and takes participants on an interactive tour through downtown Toronto.

In the past, photo-slide viewers were popular as whimsical gadgets often attached to key chains and carried as private mementos of friends and family, vacations and events. In instills Krawesky has reinvented and inverted this personalized mode of viewing to exhibit photographs of anonymous figures moving through public spaces. Installation sites are located in the streets with each slide viewer containing the photograph that was taken at that spot—reflecting both the act of looking at, and the act of making photographs.

For the past seven years, ADAM KRAWESKY’s professional art practice has involved documenting life on the streets, and how people interact in open, public environments—often unknowing fixtures in an urban landscape. In instills, Krawesky continues this investigation with a new series of images of anonymous figures moving through the city—reflecting the ways that people engage with their urban environments. The artist’s street scenes evoke the relationship between the omnipresence of the built city, and the ways humans navigate and make sense of the spaces around them. In Krawesky's photography, the monotony of everydayness is countered by the emotive qualities of space in a manner that recalls Henri Lefebvre's formulation of modern space as at once conceived, perceived, and lived. Krawesky's solitary figures carry the ambiguous burden of the city, embodying a response to the anonymity and enclosure that characterize urban space. Characteristic of Krawesky's work is the sense that there is intrigue lying around the corner, in the shadows, just outside of the frame's reach. His photographs express the opposition of presence and absence, of affect and tedium that one experiences in the city.

ADAM KRAWESKY’s work has been exhibited in Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto Free Gallery, and the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, and has been featured in the 2006 and 2008 CONTACT Toronto Photography Festivals. His large-scale photographs can be found in both private and corporate collections, and have been showcased as part of the Visible City Project + Archive. Photographic essays of his work have appeared in AZURE magazine and in PUBLIC (Public 32, “Urban Interventions”) a unique interdisciplinary journal that explores contemporary cultural issues. He can be seen next in September 2009 at PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY in the group exhibition and launch of the limited-edition portfolio entitled microcosm.

CONTACT is an annual month-long festival of photography with more than 1,000 local, national, and international artists at more than 220 venues across the Greater Toronto Area in May. Founded as a not-for-profit organization 13 years ago, CONTACT is devoted to celebrating and fostering an appreciation of the art and profession of photography. As the largest photography event in the world, and a premiere cultural event in Toronto, CONTACT stimulates excitement and discussion among a diverse audience that has grown to over 1,000,000. The theme of this year’s festival, STILL REVOLUTION, examines how each significant innovation in photography’s evolution has radically altered the creation and consumption of images, irrevocably changing the history of visual representation.

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