2024 exhibitions - Karsh-Masson Gallery

February 1 to April 14, 2024 

Opening: Thursday, February 1, 5:30 to 7:30 pm 
Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance. 

Artist tour: Sunday, April 14, 2 pm  
Free admission. Presented in English. 

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF – 2.2 MB ] 

Toronto-based artist Emily DiCarlo’s exhibition Tenuous Systems demonstrates through multi-channel video and sound installations the many ways in which clock time is variable, vulnerable, and far from absolute. Known officially as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is measured at the Greenwich meridian (0° longitude) in Greenwich, England, clock time purports to standardize time across borders, cultures, and economies. While we might describe time as stilling, skipping, dragging, marching or flowing, our lives are forever grinding against the 24-hour standard. And yet, the reality of time is far more slippery. Subject to human error, environmental catastrophe, and even shifts in consciousness, time is not static and changeless, but rather actively produced by governments, corporations, and even individuals. In this way, DiCarlo invites us to imagine time not as an abstracted, universal measurement indifferent to our existence, but as an embodied entity, endlessly woven into the fabric of our ordinary, everyday lives.    

- Excerpt by Justine Kohleal

Biography 

Emily DiCarlo’s interdisciplinary practice considers site, temporality and collaboration as the foundational principles for meaning-making, connecting the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration. She writes about the sociopolitical implications of predominant time structures in contrast to alternative temporalities through feminist phenomenology, queer time theory and more-than-human ontologies.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. 

2023 Karsh Award Laureate

Curator: Melissa Rombout 

May 9 to July 21, 2024 

Opening: Thursday, May 9, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Speeches will begin at 6 pm.
Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance. 

Moderated panel discussion: Friday, June 7, noon to 1:30 pm
Free admission. Bilingual presentation. Presented in-person and virtually. 

“Natural History Collections and Creative Exchange: Christine Fitzgerald’s Photographs of Specimens”  

• Moderator: Dr. Melissa Rombout (exhibition curator) 
• Panellists: Christine Fitzgerald (2023 Karsh Award Laureate), Dr. Danika Goosney (President and CEO, Canadian Museum of Nature), Guy Levesque (Associate Vice-President, Innovation, Partnerships and Entrepreneurship, University of Ottawa) 

This panel discussion considers innovative approaches to creative collaboration across disciplines and how activating aesthetic reconsideration of scientific collections addresses our present moment of ecological precarity. 

Artist and curator tour: Sunday, June 23, 2 pm 
Free admission. Bilingual presentation. Presented in-person. 

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF – 2.9 MB ] 

The Karsh Award honours the artistic legacy of celebrated Ottawa photographers Yousuf and Malak Karsh. It is presented every four years to a local mid-career or established artist for their outstanding body of work and their significant contribution to the artistic discipline in a photo/lens-based medium.  

Requiem features fascinating photographs of natural history specimens by Christine Fitzgerald through which the pleasures of looking and the experience of wonder are again present. During her artist residencies studying natural history collections, Fitzgerald selected specimens, collected long ago by naturalists for scientific study, situating these formerly living creatures within a tradition of photographic image-making itself. Fitzgerald presents each unique specimen as the precious object it appeared to be to its bygone human collector. Fitzgerald’s photographs are in themselves material objects: she intermingles digital images with a resuscitation of bygone photographic techniques, practised during the same era of avid specimen collecting—daguerreotypy, wet collodion plates, platinum and palladium printing onto archival rag, pigmented gum impressions.

- Excerpt by Dr. Melissa Rombout 

Biographies 

Christine Fitzgerald is a photo-based artist and the City of Ottawa’s 2023 Karsh Award Laureate. In her practice, she merges historical photographic methods with digital technology, experimenting with photographic printing techniques, substrates, and the manual application of pigment. Fitzgerald experiments with the imperfections and permutations achieved from mixing current and obsolete photographic techniques, allowing her to push the boundaries of her medium and create a unique aesthetic. Fitzgerald is a graduate of SPAO: Photographic Arts Centre, and Acadia and Dalhousie universities. Her work is held in private and public collections and has been featured by the CBC, The Washington Post, and National Geographic. Fitzgerald was selected in 2016 as the Fine Art Photographer of the Year by the Lucie Foundation in New York City, and in 2017 she was a category winner of the International Julia Margaret Cameron Competition for Women Photographers. Her artwork was part of the 2019 Open Channels National Exhibition at the Âjagemô Hall Gallery at the Canada Council for the Arts, and then featured in 2020 at the International Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2020, her artwork was at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC as part of the featured exhibition, New Light: Canadian Women Artists. Her large collage of cyanotype prints was a top jury selection for Art & Science Initiatives showcased at the influential American Geophysical Union International 2022 Meeting in Chicago, IL, and in 2023, Fitzgerald’s solo exhibition Vanishing was featured at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, British Columbia. 

Dr. Melissa Rombout is an independent curator and lecturer on histories of photography. She received her Ph.D. from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and has had a prolific career working with museums, libraries, and archives in Canada and internationally. Her recent doctoral research revisited J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1961) in her proposal for a theoretical blueprint to consider the performativity of contemporary art as political speech. Her current curatorial projects focus on collaborative practices between artists and scientists in fostering environmental advocacy and the resurgence of “extinct” photographic technologies as medium and metaphor in addressing eco-anxiety.

Curator: Ash Barbu 

August 1 to October 27, 2024  

Opening: Thursday, August 1, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance. 

Artists’ tour and performance: Sunday, September 22, 2 pm
Free admission. Presented in English. 

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF – 1.9 MB ]   

Origin Story explores the question of narrative agency within the context of trans storytelling. Pursuing a range of material and conceptual strategies, Aylin Abbasi, Ash Barbu, Nic Cooper, Theo J. Cuthand, Kama La Mackerel, and Cara Tierney gather from unresolved pasts and create shared futures. Together, they engage with intersecting histories of trans care, queer activism, and Indigenous worldmaking to illustrate new models of inheritance and (un)becoming. Through these considerations, viewers are invited to read transition as a process of continual reinvention. Origin Story traces the dimensions of non-linear time through ideas of circularity, repetition, and multiplicity. The exhibition proposes forms of connection and relations of mutual commitment that express a collective resilience. 

Biographies 

Aylin Abbasi is an Iranian interdisciplinary feminist artist whose practice explores oppression in her social and political life experiences. In May 2024, Abbasi received her MFA from the University of Ottawa. She was the art director at “Tajrobeh Design Studio” in Tehran and an official member of Tehran’s Motion Graphics Designers Association. In her work, Abbasi highlights practices of being multiple as she learns who she is and what has changed in her new North American context. 

Ash Barbu is an artist, curator, and educator whose work examines the relationship between trans autobiography, queer theory, and curatorial studies. They hold an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto. Recently, they were the Guest Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts and a Research Fellow at Visual AIDS, New York. In November 2023, Barbu and Aylin Abbasi presented their first collaborative film Mother Ladder Night at the DARC Microcinema, Ottawa.

Nic Cooper’s work is concerned with cultural memory and visual histories, reflecting their queer, non-binary and Croatian-Polish identity. Using historical and current images, their recent work investigates public actions across disparate times and locations, connecting the power of community gathering. Cooper received their MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa in 2020, published their writing in Drain Magazine’s issue Queerfacture, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. Their work is featured on book covers published by Routledge and Oxford University Press, and they have participated in artist residencies in Israel-Palestine, Nicaragua and Canada.

Since 1995, Theo Jean Cuthand has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally. His work has been exhibited at galleries including the Remai Modern, National Gallery of Canada, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and Walker Art Centre. He is a trans man who uses he/him pronouns. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent and a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.

Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, and literary translator who believes in love, justice, and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research and community-arts facilitation.  

Raised in Tiotenactokte/Skanawetsy/Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC, Cara Tierney is a Scottish-Irish-Italian white settler trans* creative whose work sits at the intersection of art, education, and collective liberation. Over the last 20 years, they have delivered and designed both arts, and arts-based conscientization workshops on unceded Algonquin land, in and around so-called Ottawa. Tierney approaches their work as an endless series of opportunities to learn, bridge creativity, communities, and share knowledge in the service of social transformation.  

November 7, 2024 to March 23, 2025

Opening and artist tour: Thursday, November 7, 5:30 to 7:30 pm 
Tour begins at 6 pm. Free admission. Presented in English. 
Access is limited to the Laurier Avenue entrance.   

Exhibition documentation images

Exhibition booklet [ PDF – 3.6 MB ]

The familiar and strange sit at a trembling fault line in Nicholas Crombach’s exhibition, Landslip. Chess pieces, fractured dentures, sea urchin shells, plastic grapes, fabric tassels and weathered glass artefacts adorn the edges of Chariot Burial (2023), a large-scale sculpture that theatrically hovers between archaeological excavation site, natural history museum tableau and crime scene. The distinction between authenticity and artifice is blurred through an unexpected collision of materials and the skeletons of two horses comprised of anything but bone; instead, carved wood, engraved aluminum, and porcelain forms present a range of treatments and techniques that call to mind decorative arts of a bygone era, set against a red flocked “ground”—a nod to the aesthetics of museological display. In the nearby Accoutrements (2023), cheeky yellow bone markers allude to the excavated site as one that is being actively processed and studied to glean meaning from a distant past. An ornate aluminum helmet and gloves are conspicuous in their medievally coded presence, these remnants of armour being part of an anachronistic tangle of human and geologic materials. 

- Excerpt by Katie Lawson

Biography 

Nicholas Crombach is an artist working in Kingston, Ontario. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award. Crombach has presented solo exhibitions in Canada, London, and Berlin. He has completed public art commissions for the City of Kingston, the City of Woodstock, and the City of Niagara Falls. Crombach’s work is represented in private and public collections including the Woodstock Art Gallery, the City of Kingston Civic Collection, and the City of Ottawa Art Collection. He has participated in several residencies, such as the Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (2022). Crombach has received support from public agencies including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.  

The artist gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council. 

Gabriela Avila-Yiptong, Claudia Gutierrez, Carl Stewart