Sept 3-11
Reception Sept 5 7-11pm
Project Gallery, Toronto
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”
— Susan Sontag
Momento Mori is a contemporary group exhibition hosted by Project Gallery which features emerging, established and local artists working in a variety of media including: painting, video, digital media, sculpture, mixed media, and photography. Memento mori is a Latin term that functions as an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. This show features works that express the ephemerality of existence through still life or related genres. The desire to freeze or preserve a moment in time has been a constant since the time of the Old Masters. This exhibition hopes to draw on traditional notions of still life, while also exploring contemporary interpretations. Works embody the idea of the passage of time, or simply represent an object in space that causes the viewer to reflect upon their own existence.
Momento Mori aims to explore how the style of still life can be utilized in a contemporary context. Project Gallery hopes to invite questioning regarding the meaning of preserving a moment in time in our fast-paced modern society. Does the transcendental nature of still life as a genre still have the power to remind viewers of their own mortality, or has this been lost in the contemporary image saturated state of society?
Featuring artworks by: Jennifer Steensma Hoag, Eldi Dundee, Lana Greben, Stephanie Booth, Eric Hynynen, C.A. Way, Erica Beyea, Amanda Rataj, Jennifer Mien Mien Lin, Lynn Price, Emerson Myers, and Nadine Maher
