TORONTO.- This week, the Ryerson Image Centre reopens with a major retrospective exploring the complex and layered view of artist Sunil Gupta’s unique transcontinental photographic vision. This exhibition features works from his diverse series, including street photography (Christopher Street, 1976; London 1982, 1982), narrative portraiture (From Here to Eternity, 1999), using text as a graphic element (Exiles, 1987), staged and constructed scenes (The New Pre-Raphaelites, 2008) and early ventures into digital image making (Trespass, 1992-1995). The exhibition, along with a new season of shows, opens on April 6 and runs through August 6 for an extended season.

Also taking place this spring/summer is a full lineup of public programming including artist talks and a book launch for the newest publication in the RIC's scholarly imprint with MIT Press, Since 1839… Eleven Essays on Photography by MoMA’s Clément Chéroux.

EXHIBITIONS ON VIEW:

From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta, A Retrospective
April 6–August 6, 2022

This exhibition offers a complex and layered view of artist Sunil Gupta’s unique transcontinental photographic vision. From Here to Eternity brings together a comprehensive selection of works from the innovative career of this pioneering community artist. From his participation in New York’s radical Gay Liberation Movement in the 1970s to his more recent campaigning in India, Gupta has inspired generations of photographers, artist/activists, and advocates for LGBTQ+ rights.

Mauvais Genre/Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers
April 6–August 6, 2022

Comprising over 160 amateur photographs, this exhibition explores a range of practices relating to cross-dressing from the 1880s to the 1980s. It is drawn from the extensive personal archives of French filmmaker and photography collector Sébastien Lifshitz. The selection includes images of spectacular cross-dressers and glamorous drag queens, but also individuals whose transgressive actions are much more discreet and domestic. Taken by mostly unknown photographers, the prints are of unnamed and unknown figures posing for the camera, using the apparel and gestures traditionally assigned to the “opposite sex.” Mauvais Genre/Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers celebrates the collective inventiveness and freedom that the seemingly simple act of dressing differently provides, celebrating self-expression and the diversity of queer and trans spectrum.

Dominique Blain: Dérive/Drift
April 6–August 6, 2022

Sensitive, powerful, and supremely delicate, Dominique Blain’s Drift comprises hundreds of press and amateur images of the sea. Found on the internet and compiled in careful layers, these images gently lift like sails in the breeze to reveal scenes of fragile, makeshift boats floating on perilous waters. This multi-channel video commemorates the countless migrants who flee situations of war, poverty, and violence, sailing in search of freedom.

Red All Over: World War II Press Photographs From the Sovfoto Agency
April 6–May 7, 2022

Between 1939 to 1945, New York City-based photography agency Sovfoto provided press outlets with an alternative perspective from “the other side” of the Second World War. As the only supplier of Soviet photojournalistic images in North America at the time, Sovfoto gave audiences a glimpse of people and places impacted by battle on the Eastern Front.

Presenting over sixty press photographs made in the USSR and Eastern Europe, Red All Over will interrogate traditional practices of photojournalism, including captioning, retouching, and circulation, prompting audiences to consider how these factors helped to shape our comprehension of World War II.

Chris Donovan: The Cloud Factory
May 18–June 18, 2022

Against a backdrop of billowing clouds of smoke, the environmental class system of Saint John, New Brunswick comes into hazy focus in Chris Donovan’s The Cloud Factory. A long-term photographic project, The Cloud Factory stems from Donovan’s frustrations over the lack of critical reporting around the fossil fuel industry in a city that is home to Canada’s largest oil refinery. With his poignant images, the artist calls attention to the issues generated by the industrialization of his hometown, revealing the families affected by industrial contamination and the socio-economic structures of a monopolized economy.

Heather Rattray: Things That I Know, Things That You Know
June 29–August 6, 2022

Things That I Know, Things That You Know documents a mother-daughter duo’s desire to connect with familial roots through the learning and re-learning of the Dutch language. Rattray chronicles intimate visual representations of their learning process, one that is simultaneously shared and independent of each other due to the distance that separates them, both geographically and in learning styles. In returning to their mother tongue, their familial relationship is transformed, their culture and traditions reclaimed.