No Looking with cheyanne turions and Annie MacDonell at SBC Gallery, Montreal, April 12

This weekend, No Looking After the Internet meets in Montreal as part of cheyanne turions’s “A Problem So Big It Needs Other People,” an exhibition about sovereignty as a form of negotiation at Montreal’s SBC Gallery. Co-facilitated with turions and with artist Annie MacDonell, we’ll be looking at an unusual archive of found photographs that are collected by and housed in the Toronto Reference Library. Come help us think through the appropriation of images as a process of negotiation, the sovereignty of images, and the political implications of labeling something as “difficult.”

No Looking After the Internet
SATURDAY, April 12, 3 – 5 pm
SBC Gallery, Montreal
Participatory discussion facilitated by Gabrielle Moser & Annie MacDonell

 

No Looking After the Internet is a “looking group” that invites participants to look at an image (or a series of images) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out-loud together. Chosen in relation to an exhibition, an artist’s body of work, or an ongoing research project, No Looking examines images without the traditional frameworks of the caption, gallery exhibition or artist’s talk. Instead, it offers the space and time for immersive looking, asking what we might see when we look at images slowly and collectively, unpacking our responses with others.

 

Premised on the idea that we don’t always trust our interpretive abilities as viewers, the aim of No Looking is to examine what makes practices of looking difficult. How does a slower form of looking allow us to be self-reflexive about our role as spectators? How do we look at images differently when we interpret them with a community of others?

 

No Looking is an ongoing, collaborative project based out of Toronto’s Gallery TPW and takes its name and inspiration from No Reading After the Internet, an out-loud reading and discussion group that meets regularly in Toronto and Vancouver (http://noreadingaftertheinternet.wordpress.com/).

 

This salon will feature images from the Toronto Reference Library’s Picture Collection, as selected by Annie MacDonell, who has been working with the collection over the last few years.