Exhibition Dates: September 10 – October 15, 2022
The Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to welcome Hank Bull and Isobel Harry under the gallery’s representation and introduce their archives with a select presentation of work in our Reading Room Gallery.
Hank Bull studied at Toronto’s New School of Art beginning in 1968 and played piano in various bands. Moving to Vancouver in 1973, he joined the Western Front Society, collaborating ever since on a wide range of productions. Bull has recently been working on a series that combines found cardboard with abstract painting to produce forms photographed in colour by Robert Keziere. Within this series is ‘The Theatre of Painting’, a pair of photographs of painted cardboard. Perhaps it's a sculpture, a building, a ruin, or the model for a stage set. The photograph documents this play within a play. The nesting of stories within stories is a classical device in literature called mise en abîme. In Hamlet, there is a play within the play. Here, it's image, within image, within image.
During the 1970s, Isobel Harry worked in several capacities within Toronto’s burgeoning contemporary art scene. She worked at A Space and had many of her photographs, including self-portraits, published in FILE magazine and in numerous other publications. She photographed punk bands appearing at the city’s Crash ‘n Burn club and Canadian and international reggae musicians both on and off stage. In the 1980s, she made a series of photographs in Toronto’s rail yards in advance of the Sky Dome’s construction and the development that followed. We will display some vintage prints from Toronto performances in our Reading Room Gallery, including those by Teenage Head, the Viletones, Leroy Sibbles and Black Uhuru. We will also showcase three of her remarkable photographs of Bob Marley in concert at Massey Hall in 1975, as well as headlining the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, Jamaica, on April 22, 1978.
