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Talk & Book Signing: Roger Ballen: Boarding House
Auditorium
6:30pm, Wednesday April 8, 2009
A talk and book signing by artist Roger Ballen in relation to the exhibit in the OCAD Professional Gallery.
The OCAD Professional Gallery presents Roger Ballen: Boarding House from March 5 to May 31, 2009. This landmark exhibition honours the launch of photographer Roger Ballen’s eighth book, Boarding House (Phaidon).
Arguably his most formally sophisticated works to date, Ballen uses contrasts and shifting planes in the images in Boarding House to multiply meanings and overtones despite tight composition. The fragmented figures and rooms in these film-based monochromes seem both everywhere and nowhere. “It’s difficult to explain this place,” says Ballen, “except that I think it exists in some way or another in most peoples’ minds.” Charles Reeve, Curator of the Professional Gallery, describes the show as “too unsettling to see, yet too gripping to resist.” He adds, “These pictures are today’s surrealism.”
This groundbreaking show aims to expand Canadian viewers’ understanding of this important South African artist by placing key images from his latest book beside other decisive works of his from the past three decades. While Ballen’s pictures from the late 1970s to early 1990s draw from the photo-documentary tradition, they prefigure his interest in formal refinement and psychological complexity, traits that have become central to his art in the last 15 years. The inexplicable, obscure limbs, shadows and forms in Boarding House mark Ballen’s latest evolutionary step.
Gallery Walk-through Tours:
Thursday evening walk-through tours are 20-30 minute discussions of the exhibition with members of the cultural community. Free and open to the public, the walk-through tours begin at 6:30 p.m. and take place in the Professional Gallery.
Thursday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.: Charles Reeve
Charles Reeve is Curator of OCAD's Professional Gallery and Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies and Art. Reeve organized the exhibition "Roger Ballen: Boarding House."
Thursday, March 26, 6:30 p.m.: Blake Fitzpatrick
Photographer Blake Fitzpatrick is Professor and Director of Research and Publications, School of Image Arts at Ryerson University.
Thursday, May 21, 6:30 p.m.: Sophie Hackett
Sophie Hackett is Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Auditorium
100 McCaul St.
Toronto, Ontario
416-977-6000 Ext. 265
Free