Exhibition Preview: Friday, February 24, 5-9pm
Exhibition Dates: February 25 - March 25, 2017
The Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to present "Canadian Photographs", our first solo exhibition of work by Geoffrey James, one of Canada's pre-eminent photographers.
For the past six years, James has travelled throughout the country confronting the many realities of Canadian life. The project promises to come to fruition in 2017, the year of the nation's sesquicentennial. "Canadian Photographs" explores the lyrical possibilities of everyday life. Canada is glimpsed from a train window, seen at a demolition derby, or a high-school prom. The photographs bear witness to Canada's past as a dominion while also looking at the sometimes provisional way the future is being built.
James' colour photographs display an uncanny wit that isolates innocent moments, seemingly banal locations, and speaks volumes about our nation's precarious identity. Seen together, this chronicle of the present is a telling document of who we are by showing us how we live, offering an opportunity to ponder where we might go from here.
Geoffrey James was born in Wales in 1942, studied Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford (BA and MA), and immigrated to Canada in 1966. A self-taught photographer, James is the author or subject of more than a dozen publications and is represented internationally in major collections. He has had solo exhibitions at the Palazzo Braschi, Rome; the Americas Society, New York; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He has participated in group shows at Documenta IX, Kassel; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; and the San Francisco MOMA. Geoffrey James is a Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, and the Governor-General's Prize in Media and Visual Arts. He lives in Toronto, where he has been named the city's first Photo Laureate.
