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Peter MacCallum

silver prints | may 25, 2005 – june 18, 2005

 

"A din of silence in a concrete factory"
The Globe and Mail | Gallery Going | Saturday, June 11, 2005 | Page R12
by Gary Michael Dault

 
Peter MacCallum's new exhibition at Peak Gallery represents a further solidifying of the Toronto-based artist's rapidly growing reputation as one of the most skillful, dedicated and accomplished photographers in the country.

MacCallum has been at the game for a while now -- he used to earn most of his living taking photographs for catalogues and magazines of other people's art -- and the daily practice of photography has clearly honed his art to the point where his own work, recently the subject of a number of important exhibitions and of a handsome, comprehensive book (Material World, published last year by YYZ Books and Museum London), has become the perfectly searching, reflective, exquisitely balanced, expressive tool it now is.

The black-and-white photographs in the Peak exhibition -- like the works reproduced in Material World -- are culled from two ongoing, parallel-running bodies of work: the artist's long sojourn in the realms of the concrete industry in Ontario (the series was begun in 1998) and his photographs of Toronto interiors--often the interiors of the studios of

artists and artisans he knows (John Brown's Studio, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto, 2004, for example, and Susan Dicks' Studio, 410 Richmond Street West, Toronto, 2004) or interiors of, as he puts it in the book, "the types of retail stores that are now becoming outmoded, such as the family hardware store" (for example, his Leo's Textiles, Old Store from 1997 and reproduced in the book, or his Brava Vintage Clothing, Queen Street West, Toronto, 2005, in the current exhibition).

MacCallum's photographs are quiet photographs. They are quiet even when their subject is a cacophony of visual incident. In his exquisite Rear Pedestals for Concrete Mixing Drums, London Machinery, London, Ontario, 2004, for example, there are so many accumulated horizontals and verticals of metal, shot through with sudden intrusions of diagonal arms and braces and what have you, that the whole composition, industrial though it may be in fact, looks inescapably cubist -- like some kinetically charged arrangement of planes and angles from an early painting by Braque or Picasso. The photograph is energized by the artist's winning way of recognizing and claiming arrangement, and ordering it into a felt but unfathomable syntax. But this arranging is managed with such quiet authority -- MacCallum has a virtuoso eye for the disposition of objects in space -- that the result is a profound and moving quiet, visually speaking. A quiet that takes its place at the core of his art (as it must at the core of all important art) as something best referred to as silence.

$1,400 each. Until June 18,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108

about the exhibition