John Bentley Mays
The art of the little black box
ART REVIEW/ the focus of the photography exhibitions in Toronto’s Contact 98 is on sex, cultural documentation and the history of the art form itself.
As you might expect, Goldin is hardly the only photo artist in Contact 98 with bodily nitty-gritty on her mind. Among the more engaging explorations of sexuality and the body in the festivals is the show provocatively (if somewhat misleadingly) called Lewd at Archive Inc. (883 Queen St. W.) Each artist represented on the international roster Eldon Garnet, Jules de Niverville, Andrea Szilasi, Carolyn White, among others-has come at the topic of the juice and meat of what we are with a spirit of poetry and forgiveness devoid of titillation, or any real lewdness. White’s pictures of body stained mattresses and Jill Stock’s oblique portraits of female curves printed on spoons aren’t pretty, but such imagery crisply focuses attention on the traces the human presence always leaves behind- traces of ourselves on the world, very like those of light on scraps of light-sensitive film.