Photographer Eldred Allen @ Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto - "Scenes From Labrador" Exhibition

Eldred Allen

Scenes From Labrador

Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

11 January - 22 February 2025

Stephen Bulger Gallery presents “Scenes From Labrador,” their first solo exhibition of work by ELDRED ALLEN (b. 1978, Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, NL). Allen, an Inuk photographer from Rigolet, has garnered attention for his expansive and stunningly lit landscape and wildlife photography. His artistic journey began in 2018 with the purchase of his first camera. As a self-taught photographer, Allen captures views of landscapes, wildlife, and human activities, using both a handheld camera and UAV/drone perspectives. After establishing a successful photography business connected to commercial services, Allen was driven to create more expressive photographs and was a quick study in transforming ordinary scenes into extraordinary ones.

This exhibition offers an introduction to several aspects of Allen’s practice. It includes colour landscapes of expansive scenes captured while standing on terra firma, as well as aerial views taken with a drone. His black-and-white images often portray traditional ways of life and community events, providing an insider’s view of both preserved heritage and contemporary living. Allen’s early success was recognized by the Inuit Art Foundation and its key supporters, which helped him connect with other artists through exhibitions and residencies. Collaborating with fine art printers in various communities allowed him to produce photographic prints of the highest quality. This is Allen’s first solo exhibition west of Newfoundland and Labrador.

ELDRED ALLEN’s work has been exhibited throughout Canada, including at the Labrador Interpretation Centre, Northwest River; The Rooms, St. John’s; the Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse; the Winnipeg Art Gallery/Qaumajug, Winnipeg; and more. He has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the ArtsNL Professional Artists Travel Fund, was shortlisted for the Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award and was longlisted for a Sobey Art Award. His work is included in public collections such as the Canadian Council Art Bank, Ottawa; Global Affairs Canada, Ottawa; the Indigenous Art Centre, Gatineau; McGill University Library and Archives, Montreal; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the RBC Art Collection; The Rooms, St. John’s; among others.

STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY

1356 Dundas Street West, Toronto, ON Canada M6J 1Y2

www.bulgergallery.com

Wendy Ewald @ Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto - The Pictures Woke the People Up: Canada, Colombia and American Alphabets

Wendy Ewald

The Pictures Woke the People Up: Canada, Colombia and American Alphabets

Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Through 15 January 2022

The Stephen Bulger Gallery presents “The Pictures Woke the People Up: Canada, Colombia and American Alphabets”, their first solo exhibition with acclaimed photographer WENDY EWALD which announces the gallery's representation of her work. For over fifty years, Wendy Ewald has collaborated on art projects with children, families, women, and teachers in Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, Morocco, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Working as a photographer and teacher, Wendy Ewald’s projects emphasize a method of collaboration that challenges the distinctions between photographer and subject. Adopting a variety of approaches, she creates projects based on a reciprocal vs. hierarchical approach. Her goal is to provide the vision of her subjects rather than merely make images of them. Through her documentary investigations of places and communities, Ewald probes questions of identity and cultural differences. In her work with children and women, she encourages them to use cameras to record themselves, their families, and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams.

This exhibition presents a selection of work from various stages of her career. During Wendy Ewald’s college years, starting in 1969, she worked with Indigenous children in Sheshatshiu, Labrador and in Eskɨnuopitijk, New Brunswick. She observed that her photography was restrained partially by a reticence to disturb her subjects. Her students’ approached their work in a more dynamic fashion. While photographing the same scene as 14-year-old Merton Ward, she was struck by the difference.  Her photographs were clear renderings of the evidence before her, whereas his portrayed life on the reservation was more expressive. She successfully applied to the Polaroid Foundation for cameras and film for her students, which enabled her to work there for four summers. We will exhibit vintage prints from that period, a film, as well as colour work made during visits to the region 39 years later.     

After working in the Appalachian Mountains in the 70s, Wendy Ewald travelled to Latin America to create work within another rural community. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1982 to photograph and teach photography in a Colombian village. She hoped that by working outside her native language she would be forced to rely on her visual skills. She was also introduced to Alicia Vásquez, a single mother living with three young sons in an invasion barrio in Bogota. Over time, she shared her life story with Ewald who brought her books of classical literature. Her mother María and other members of the family told their stories which prompted Ewald to illustrate the family’s memoir. Alicia was uncomfortable around a camera. Photographs made by Ewald and the children she taught in the village of Ráquira are interwoven with transcribed and edited stories of the Vásquez family. Our exhibition displays an excerpt from the book of this work, MAGIC EYES: Scenes From An Andean Girlhood.

In 1991, Wendy Ewald became a senior research associate at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and founded the Literacy through Photography program for Durham Public Schools in North Carolina. During this time, she became aware of the language barrier amongst immigrant and local communities. She recognized the prevalence of cultural descriptors in North American children’s alphabet primers (i.e ‘C’ is for ‘Car’) and collaborated with children from different backgrounds to create primers of their own. She asked students to think of words for each letter of the English and Spanish alphabets and assign them visual signs specific to their culture. Wendy Ewald photographed the signs, objects, or scenes selected. When the large-format negatives were developed, the children altered them with Sharpies, adding the letter and word they illustrated. Our exhibition will include alphabets from several communities.

Wendy Ewald has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. She was also a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School from 2000-2002. She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, the George Eastman House, Rochester, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, the Fotomuseum, Wintherthur, Switzerland, the Corcoran Gallery of American Art, Washington, DC, and The Queens Museum, New York, among others. Ewald’s work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. She has published fourteen books, her fifth, a retrospective documenting her projects entitled Secret Games, was published by Scalo in 2000. Two books were published in 2005. A third, To The Promised Land was published in 2006 to accompany an outdoor installation in Margate, England, with “new starts” and refugees commissioned by ArtAngel. She was an artist in residence at Amherst College for eleven years where she taught the course, Collaborative Art: The practice and theory of working with communities. This Is Where I Live, which maps Israel/Palestine through 14 different communities, was published by MACK in 2015 in conjunction with a traveling exhibition, “This Place”. America, Border, Culture, Dreamer a collaboration with young immigrants to the US was published by Little Brown in Fall 2018 to accompany a public art installation in Philadelphia. Her film for PBS, Portraits and Dreams, was released in 2020 accompanied by an expanded update of the original book published in 1985. Wendy Ewald’s project for “Towards a Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40” continues until December 19, 2021, throughout Chicago, presented by the Smart Museum. The book The Devil is Leaving his Cave, will be published by MACK Books in 2022. From November 8 ­– 28, 2021, Wendy Ewald and artist Zak Hajjaoui have collaborated on a billboard that will be on display at the corner of Richmond Street East and Parliament Street, Toronto, as part of For Freedoms North American “Billboards” exhibition. For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action.

Wendy Ewald, Katherine Hyde, Lisa Lord

Literacy and Justice through Photography

© Teachers' College Press

Wendy Ewald, Alexandra Lightfoot

I Wanna Take Me a Picture

© Beacon Press

In addition to her artistic practice, Wendy Ewald has published two books for teachers and families, I Wanna Take Me a Picture and Literacy and Justice through Photography. She has been collaborating with partners in Tanzania for the past ten years to create photographic teaching materials for the national primary and secondary school curriculums. In 2021 she developed a course in teaching and learning through images for Humanities and Education students at the University of Dodoma, Tanzania.

STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY

1356 Dundas Street West, Toronto, ON M6JIY2

www.bulgergallery.com

Robert Bourdeau, Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto - The Station Point

Robert Bourdeau: The Station Point 

Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Through June 11, 2011

Exhibition of work by artist ROBERT BOURDEAU  is on view in Toronto at Stephen Bulger Gallery. THE STATION POINT presents a survey of Robert Bourdeau's work in conjunction with the release of a major monograph co-published by the Stephen Bulger Gallery Press and the Magenta Foundation. This exhibition also marks the first time in his career that Robert Bourdeau has shown enlargements of his large format negatives.

Robert Bourdeau (b. Kingston, On, 1931) spent several years photographing before being drawn into a deeper understanding of the medium by his discovery of Aperture Magazine. This led to a crucial encounter with Minor White in 1958, and a spiritual, decade-long friendship. The tie with the school that emerged from Camera Work was further enhanced by Robert Bourdeau's friendship with Paul Strand in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Taken over the past four decades throughout Europe and North America, these large format photographs are of age old landscapes, historical treasures of architecture nestled in the countryside and inactive industrial sites reclaimed by nature. Robert Bourdeau is deeply interested in how certain structures lose their identity and take on other feelings and ambiguities, and at other times become guardians or sentinels of physical and emotional space.  He is also fascinated by the dark mysticism of mediaeval architecture and by brooding landscapes; the exactness of his photography disclosing the hidden geometry of nature.

Working with a large-format view camera, Robert Bourdeau favours long exposures. Most of his photographs are contact printed, either from an 11 x 14 inch or an 8 x 10 inch negative, a method that allows for a minimal loss of definition in reproduction. Robert Bourdeau has exhibited internationally since 1967.  His work is in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois;  University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois;  Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas;  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Quebec; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.

STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY, TORONTO

www.bulgergallery.com

Alison Rossiter Photographs Exhibition - Stephen Bulger Gallery

The Stephen Bulger Gallery, in Toronto, announce "Lament", an exhibition of new work by Alison Rossiter that pays homage to the disappearing materials of analogue photography.

In the project, "Lament", Alison Rossiter creates photographic objects that rely on the intrinsic qualities of expired papers. She collects expired photo papers from throughout the 20th Century and processes them to reveal the years of extemporaneous exposure, moisture, humidity, and physical disruptions that have created latent imagery. The remarkable images she produces are silver abstractions and illusions, which come from coaxing these silver gelatin papers to completion.

The artist writes "Five years ago, I thought that I could no longer buy sheet film for a 5 x 7 camera. Fortunately, I was mistaken, but my momentary panic prompted a massive search for discontinued gelatin silver materials. Photography, as I know it, is disappearing." This project would have been unimaginable just some two decades ago when graded gelatin silver papers of every variety were still widely available and the norm. Considering the digital advances in photography, the work speaks to the materials of the medium and makes one aware of the subtlety and variety of photographic surfaces that are now a part of our history.

Alison Rossiter has been making photographs since 1970, and in the past decade has focused her work on the elemental components of the photographic process. Exploring the inherent characteristics of the medium, she works in the darkroom to create photograms of books, light drawings of horses and formal contact prints of sheet film.

Alison Rossiter's photographs can be found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Centre for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California; the Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton; the Winnipeg Art gallery, Winnipeg; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, among many others.

Stephen Bulger Gallery - April 25 - May 23, 2009, Tuesday to Saturday 11am - 6pm - 1026 Queen Street West - Toronto ON - M6J 1H6 - Canada - http://www.bulgergallery.com/

Phil Bergerson Photographs Exhibition - Stephen Bulger Gallery

The Stephen Bulger Gallery announce its fifth exhibition by Canadian Phil Bergerson featuring his most recent work "Sublime Encounters". Spanning the last fifteen years, Phil Bergerson has traveled extensively across the United States, photographing cities both small and large. His last series, "Shards of America," was an ironic commentary on the culture of the United States. It harnessed the best of documentary traditions, interweaving a selection of powerful themes to present a critical examination of America's rich social landscape. In his most recent body of work, "Sublime Encounters," Bergerson continues his investigations of cultural detritus of everyday life but with a more poetic approach. He is interested in exploring the complexities of what it is to be human with less emphasis on the American experience.

Bergerson's photographs are poignant records of the beauty of 'organic' installations, small moments created through a mixture of human intent, nature's intervention, time and his own curiosity. The photographs document that which people consciously and unconsciously leave behind - that which speaks about them as individuals. Often the residue of these elements is so subtle that detection is difficult. "Sublime Encounters" refers to the awe inspiring moments of recognition that a photographer experiences when contemplating sets of relationships that suddenly becomes deeply and clearly "seen". Bergerson's images transcend the viewer's vision of our urban landscape by presenting us with an original perspective that is consistently moving and entirely unforgettable.

Bergerson has photographed for over 30 years. His work has been exhibited internationally and is found in many prestigious collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa. His photographs have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Toronto Life and Walrus Magazine, and his book, Shards of America, was published in September 2004. From 1975 to 2007, Bergerson was a professor of photography at Ryerson University in Toronto where, amongst other community initiatives, he established and organized the annual international "Kodak Lecture Series" on photography.

Stephen Bulger Gallery - March 14 – April 18, 2009 - Reception for the artist on Saturday, March 14th, from 1 – 5 pm. 1026 Queen Street West - Toronto ON - M6J 1H6 - Canada - http://www.bulgergallery.com/

The Death of Photography - Stephen Bulger Gallery Exhibition

Robert Burley, Michel Campeau, Alison Rossiter - A Stephen Gallery Exhibition "from today, painting is dead!" Paul Delaroche, June, 1839. When the invention of photography was announced to the public on January 7, 1839 it created a sensation for both its advocates and adversaries. At present, photography is arguably more popular than ever, but it is also at the end of an era. Digital systems are rapidly making analog materials obsolete. This exhibition includes the work of three artists who are each commemorating this milestone event in the history of art and technology.

Robert Burley - The goal of this project, "Disappearance of Darkness", is to create a photographic record of a rapidly disappearing manufacturing infrastructure dedicated to the production and use of photochemical materials. The images presented here document the final year of the Kodak Canada facility in Toronto. This facility, which was made up of 18 buildings on a 5 hectare site, had a one hundred year history of producing photographic films and papers. It was sold in 2006 and demolished in the summer of 2007.

Michel Campeau - With this work, "Darkroom", Campeau articulates the decline of photography by concentrating on the obsolescence of private darkrooms. His investigation is like that of an accident expert, one who scrutinizes the incongruity of darkrooms and throws the spotlight on the bric-à-brac of plumbing and electricity, the ventilation-system engines, the posted iconography, the splattering of silver salts, the wear of equipment and the countdown of timers that seem to defy the disappearance of the panchromatic spectre. Campeau's project is the first to be selected for a monograph by Martin Parr, the artistic director of a new series of books published by Nazraeli Press.

Alison Rossiter - In this work "Lament", Rossiter has been creating photographic objects that rely on the intrinsic qualities of old papers and films. She has been buying expired photo papers from throughout the 20th Century and processing them without any additional exposure, in search of light fog or dark fading. She has also been collecting expired sheet film of different makes and sizes to make photograms. The remarkable photographs she produces are silver abstractions of minimal imagery and are the result of light leaks, age, and circumstantial damage.

Stephen Bulger Gallery - January 5 – February 2, 2008 - Opening reception on Saturday, January 12, from 2 – 5 PM. 1026 Queen Street West - Toronto ON - M6J 1H6 - Canada - http://www.bulgergallery.com/