Proof is Gallery 44’s annual group exhibition of work by emerging Canadian artists, reflecting a range of current concerns and practices in contemporary photography and lens-based media. Proof is often one of the first exhibitions in a professional context for an emerging artist. Past exhibitions have featured work by Kotama Bouabane, Leila Fatemi, Isabelle Hayeur, Anique Jordan, Laurie Kang, Germaine Koh, Luther Konadu, Meryl McMaster, Karice Mitchell, Elise Rasmussen and Althea Thauberger.
“In Proof 29, artists Holly Chang, Christina Oyawale and Neeko Paluzzi present installations that place their photographic practices within expanded spatial and material contexts, as their work moves from intimate specificity into the sphere of collective meaning-making. These openings correlate also to the artists’ shared investment in the open-ended, the non-linear and the indeterminate…[The artists] deeply implicate themselves within their image-making methods, through ambient conditions of feeling, meditations on personal circumstance and veiled performance. In Proof 29, they allow us to join their working-through, offering the open invitation of the perpetually unresolved.” - excerpt from process/processing
For more information read process/processing, an essay by curator and writer Talia Golland.
Holly Chang is an artist and curator living in Toronto who has completed her MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York University. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation identity as a mixed-race person; she explores her cross-cultural identity and draws on her hybrid background for inspiration. In her practice, she incorporates photography, archives, ceramics, textiles, and collage. Chang identifies as a queer artist, and she further relates the experiences of being queer to her mixed-race identity.
Neeko Paluzzi (he/him) holds two masters degrees from the University of Ottawa: a Masters of Fine Arts (2022) and a Masters of Film Studies (2013). In addition, he is a graduate of the Photographic Arts and Production program at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (2017). He was the recipient of the Karsh Continuum Photography Award from the City of Ottawa in 2021, had a feature exhibition at the Scotiabank CONTACT Festival in 2019 and was the winner of the 2018 Project X, Photography Grant from the Ottawa Arts Council. Paluzzi currently teaches English at the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute.
Christina Oyawale (they/them) is a Black non-binary disabled lens-based Tkaronto artist, curator and designer. They hold a BFA in Photography and minor in Music and Cultural Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University. Their artistic practice is based in documenting the radical occupation of space, influenced by their interests in disability studies and aesthetics. They approach their practice as a means of exploring the ways in which identity and culture are both represented and embodied in our society and how it intersects with other social categories like gender, race and sexuality.