Momentum Exhibition - PCP 21 years

Logo © Perth Centre for Photography

 

October 31, 2013 to December 22, 2013

 

Perth Centre for Photography http://www.pcp.org.au

Curated by Paola Anselmi
2013 is a milestone year for the Perth Centre for Photography. PCP is coming of age. It’s been an extraordinary journey of growth. From humble beginnings as the Photography Gallery of WA at the Bridge Gallery in William Street, to a second incarnation as the Photography Centre at ArtsHouse, and finally the Perth Centre for Photography on Brisbane Street and now in its new premises on Aberdeen street, the PCP’s future has never looked more positive. In over two decades of existence the PCP has made it its missions to foster, support and promote the best of photographic practice and practitioners in this state and beyond. 

Momentum is a coming of age story. It's about looking back as well as ahead to new initiatives and growth.  

RICOCHET - VOIES OFF Festival 2013 - artiste sélectionné dans la catégorie internationale - selected artist, international category - ARLES France.

Christophe Canato 2013 selected artist

Dc Thea Costantino wrote about AD VITAM ÆTERNAM

Life, eternal

Christophe Canato’s series Ad Vitam Aeternam (To the eternal life) records a time capsule: a small village in the north of France that appears to have been struck by a fairy tale curse that has sent the entire population to sleep. Perhaps sleep isn’t quite the right word—it suggests something at rest soon to awaken, dreaming, kicking, active on a mechanical level. The state of Canato’s village is more akin to suspended animation. The rust doesn’t spread, the buildings’decay is arrested, the abundant weeds grow no worse. Blowflies have ceased to buzz in windowsills. Layers of peeling wallpaper hang precariously, fluttering flipbooks of bygone styles. Decades of pickled vegetables remain in cellars, already embalmed.  Even the dust motes are immobile, forming solid walls mid-air. The village has run out of time,
literally, and Canato reveals it as a new Pompeii.

At the centre of the village is an ancient building: a church which has survived five hundred years of natural and human disasters. At different points in its history it has been contained within the borders of this nation or that region, threatened by men with footfalls governed by drumbeats, threatened by men on horseback, men in tanks. The village is much more ancient, resting on thousand years of stratified human waste. Every time the village has been levelled, its people have simply rebuilt. Yet, improbably, the church has remained standing, oblivious of the insect lives of the creatures that have worshipped within its walls.

I imagine the village gradually changing pace, slowing down. The old people start dying, leaving mouldy attics full of dead doves, arcane farming equipment, a bride’s trousseau kept aside for a daughter who never came home. The young people leave for city jobs and only visit for funerals. The church bells ring irregularly, barely noticed—the villagers no longer rely on the schedule of prayer to tell the time of day.



Coming from a much more frenetically paced world, Canato stumbles upon the slumbering village like a lost traveller. An unnerving quiet pervades the site. It seems like an unknown atrocity has emptied the place, some nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but nothing so catastrophic has caused people to abandon these buildings. The anachronistic contents of the houses, neatly packed away, show the village simply as a casualty of the slow demise of a centuries-old way of life, still visible as ruins, and at its centre an ancient church. This place waits, undisturbed, as if for the fabled kiss that can bring life back to cold, dead lips.


Thea Costantino, Curtin University, 2013

INTIMACIES - Wallflower Photomedia Gallery, Mildura Vic, June 8 to July 4 2013 - Curated by participating artists Christophe Canato and Christine Tomas

Curated by participating artists Christophe Canato and Christine Tomas; Erin Coates, Thea Constantino and  Justin Spiers will present audiences with photomedia art that delves into unconventional notions of intimacy.

The intimate is an invisible territory, held within us even as it may be expressed without. The tasks of artists, of course, is to communicate things beyond the literal, not merely to provide accurate representations of the visible but to represent the invisible, the territory of perception, of intellect and emotion. The five artists in Intimacies are all working to reconcile the objective, the concrete and real, and the subjective, the inner gaze. - John Barrett-Lennard- curator, writer and critic (Extract from catalogue essay)


Opening: 7 June, 5pm
Exhibition continues: June 8 - July 4 2013

Wallflower Photomedia Gallery
41 Deakin Ave Mildura, Vic

Wallflower Photomedia Gallery is located in Mildura, Australia, and was established to highlight and create further readings of photography within a regional context. It aims to present the work of artists using lens based mediums from all over Australia, locally and from the world.

CDC - "Our fears and strengths are born in childhood play" - Christophe Canato FEATURED ARTIST by Alasdair Foster, 31 May 2013

RICOCHET@ christophe canato

“Our fears and strengths are born in childhood play” 

Alasdair Foster is a consultant specialising in international cultural projects and a researcher in the theory of arts policy formation. He has 20 years’ experience heading national arts institutions in Europe and Australia and over 35 years of working in the not-for-profit sector (both as a board member and as an employee). 

www.culturaldevelopmentconsulting.com/2013/05/31/8065/

IT IS AN AGE OF BECOMING. A voyage already begun: the maternal haven to stern and the churn of adolescence still to come. It is a time when the brain is plastic; knowledge is sketchy but tacked together with the rich embroidery of the imagination. These are the dog days before puberty.

Christophe Canato’s photographs are not portraits but portrayals. It is not biography that they unfold so much as a state of being. These are evocations of a time it is difficult to reconstruct as an adult. A time when one knew less and believed more; a time when one trembled at details but embraced the ineffable. The time when we lived as children.

Set in an elegant blackness and lit for the warm chiaroscuro of a Renaissance painting, each image presents a conundrum. A game. A play of ideas. A boy appears with thorns along the ridge of his nose. A biomorphic hybrid hinting at dragons, dinosaurs or perhaps a rhino, but also a metaphor for a curiously prickly exterior adopted as camouflage for uncertainty.

Another boy with impossibly large eyes regards us from under his animal pelt hood. He appears frail yet empowered, perhaps by some shamanistic magic of his own conception. Another is lost to the sounds of the sea whispering to him from deep inside a conch. The phenomenon has transported him far from the here and now. To what distant shore has his mind journeyed?

Entitled Ricochet, Christophe Canato’s new body of work embraces the uncertain trajectories of the childhood experience. Just as the stray bullet glances tangentially from the rock, so a boy’s perception refracts from the surfaces of his mind like sunlight on a crystal, scattering in iridescent scintillation. But, to the Francophone artist, ‘ricochet’ has another meaning, for in France it is the name given to the pastime of skimming flat stones so that they hop across a still expanse of water. A game in which, for a few moments, energy defies the baser logic that stone must always drown.

Christophe Canato’s images of boys are accompanied by photographic still-lifes. A tooth and three buttons, one of horn another mother-of-pearl, are both curios and talismans. They speak softly of what lies beneath the surface and of the imminence of death. Wrapped in a handkerchief they are carried with their new owner, treasures to show to others and auguries to contemplate alone.

A dead mouse, the amber remains of a lizard, the mysterious hump of (perhaps) a termite nest; an archetypical pap-shaped bivouac of woven branches, the natural helicopter of a sycamore seed and the grave of a small pet. The mind of a boy is a cabinet of curiosities.

This is a tightly constructed body of photographs through which a number of complex ideas reverberate. It is not just that the boyhood imagination is inventive, it is also collective. Ideas are shared, actions mimicked, styles adopted and tales believed. The period before puberty is one in which we first discern the expectations the world has of us. Having left the close embrace of the maternal to explore the nature of being an individual, the child discovers demands are being made, ambitions set. The mould begins to wrap around the clay. There is tension between a desire to conform and the urge to discover what might be possible.

A boy sits with his eyes covered by a friend; in such a state he must rely upon his companion to know what might be seen. Is this a prison or a place of safety? Is it better to do as others do, see the world through their eyes, or experience it directly and perhaps find oneself alone? It is only in adult-life that we come to understand that all innovation is spun from what already is; that every individual, however eccentric, is an expression of the same vocabulary of being.

But do we, as adults, also have something to learn from these long-lost childhood days? In growing older and wiser, did we, along the way, let go of something precious? The willingness to believe. The charm of imagination to imbue the detritus of the ordinary with its own peculiar magic. To see the world anew and to marvel.

Posted by CDC on 31 May 

ARTIST TALK, March 14th at 9pm 2013, Miik Green Studio, 64 Crawford Rd Maylands

Christophe Canato Ricochet 2013,
metallic paper, archival pigment print

Canato will discuss his practice in response to geographical location: before, during and beyond, Australia. Graduating from the Beaux-Arts in France, his early work explored new conception and interpretations of the photographic medium. Based in Perth since 2005, his photographs challenge traditional approaches to this medium. His latest work articulates perception and interpretation of our social, cultural and material affiliation.

Miik Green
64 Crawford Rd Maylands 6051
m +61 402 030 254
w miikgreen.com

http://www.miikgreen.com/2012/11/570/

Finalist - 2012 Print Award - Fremantle Arts Centre - WOMEN OF JERUSALEM

WOMEN OF JERUSALEM @ christophe canato

This photographic series coincides with Christophe Canato’s early 2011 work in progress. It has been finalised for the yearly collective exhibition The Station Of  The Cross achieved by Curator Catherine Czerw in 2012, Perth Western Australia.

In his first research, Canato’s work in progress was about the women of his life. He was raised in a matriarcal family environment with a dominant Italian grandmother, a severe feminist mother and politically engaged, a loving but independant big sister eleven years older and a close and protective aunt in a fusional relationship. These powerful women were the fairies who bent over his cradle bequeathing power and fears, responsible for his orientations, engagements and regrets.

Motivated by this context, Canato realized a photographic series of intimate segnor white hair women dressed in white camisole. These bright evanescent photographs wobble between serenity versus opressiveness, purity versus degeneration, death versus angelic, beauty versus repulsion.

With his desire to represent the station number eight from the Station of the Cross, Canato finds the perfect match with this previous work and a resonance in the religious text.

“…

For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us’. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” *

Women of Jerusalem is an allegience of Canato’s women of life and more largely, a dedication of all women with their tolls in religion, their cultural tributes and their social responsibilities.

* Extract from the station of The Cross. Station number eight, Women of Jerusalem.