Private collection & public exhibition: the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Responding to Photography

This paper is a detailed description and analysis of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 1984 exhibition Responding to Photography: Selected Works from Private Toronto Collections. One of the first original photography exhibitions organized by the gallery and Maia-Mari Sutnik, the 156 works were drawn entirely from private Toronto collections. The exhibition would come to shape the collecting policy of the photography collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario and set it apart from other institutions across Canada. The selected works represented a generalist collecting philosophy (influenced by Sam Wagstaff) that included photographs by anonymous makers and those made for purposes other than art. Through an analysis of the institution’s historical relationship with photography as well as the context in which the show was developed, this paper proposes that Sutnik’s exhibition is a significant historic marker and indicative of the status of photography in Toronto during the 1980s, a time of increased international prominence for the medium.

Private collection & public exhibition: the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Responding to Photography

This paper is a detailed description and analysis of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 1984 exhibition Responding to Photography: Selected Works from Private Toronto Collections. One of the first original photography exhibitions organized by the gallery and Maia-Mari Sutnik, the 156 works were drawn entirely from private Toronto collections. The exhibition would come to shape the collecting policy of the photography collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario and set it apart from other institutions across Canada. The selected works represented a generalist collecting philosophy (influenced by Sam Wagstaff) that included photographs by anonymous makers and those made for purposes other than art. Through an analysis of the institution’s historical relationship with photography as well as the context in which the show was developed, this paper proposes that Sutnik’s exhibition is a significant historic marker and indicative of the status of photography in Toronto during the 1980s, a time of increased international prominence for the medium.

Spaces of Performance in the New Moscow: the Case of Theatre Square

Combining critical analysis, personal accounts, and original photography, this essay discusses Theatre Square, Moscow's most prominent theatrical destination, and examines the dramatic changes it underwent in the Soviet era, as well as after the demise of the Soviet Union. In following Yury Lotman's notion of the ‘ensemble’, I argue that the recent reconstruction of the garden in front of the Bolshoi Theatre created a particular set of conditions under which the difference between the ‘diversely encoded’ landmarks of Theatre Square became less relevant. The article also looks into whether the new and newly reconstructed gardens and parks of post-Soviet Moscow detract from, as some critics have suggested, or on the contrary contribute to, the act of remembering the past.