Referencing various media, places, and experiences, Proof 30 artists Beau Gomez, Morgan Sears-Williams and Michaëlle Sergile extend an invitation to reflect. Childhood photographs, archival television clips and local geographies constitute points of departure from which the artists develop concepts through film photography, textile weaving, video and 16mm film. Considering the contemporary context of their referenced material, each artist encourages new understandings from the familiar, and explores the malleability of personal and political subjectivity—and how these subjectivities evolve through changing relationships to identity and culture.
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.
For more information read Otherwise Sensibilities, an essay by curator, researcher and writer Sarah Edo.
2024 marks the 30th edition of Proof—Gallery 44's annual emerging artist exhibition, established in 1994—in celebration, Proof Yearbook shares the program's legacy and archive on view in the Vitrines and online. The exhibition began as Latent Images in 1987, pulling emerging artists' works from a general call for submissions. In 1993, Gallery 44 held its first call specifically soliciting submissions from emerging artists. Met with an overwhelming response, the gallery's Exhibition Selection Committee created a non-thematic, national forum to platform artists working in unconventional materials and photographic processes to reflect current concerns and practices of emerging Canadian photographers.
Thirty years later, Proof remains true to its roots.
Proof 30 is generously supported by the Fabio Mascarin Foundation, a partnership with a shared commitment to advance the careers of emerging artists.
Beau Gomez is a lens-based artist whose practice is informed by ideas, challenges and conversations around cross-cultural narratives as they relate to positions of community, and of otherness. He is interested in activating storytelling and the realm of possibility it offers: as a vehicle for illustrating memory, as an operative point of tension and affect, and as a radical exercise in holding space. Traversing visual and verbal material, his work is grounded in image-making as a conduit between individual and collective history, giving permission to shared means of learning, nurturing and renewal.
Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities—and more specifically of women—or communities living in diverse intersections, through weaving. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race.
Morgan Sears-Williams (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultivator based in Toronto and Vancouver. Sears-Williams’s practice embraces an embodied and personal reflection on the body and queer community while speaking to larger structures of power, oppression and social constructions of space. Investigating the use of analog film as a form of projected image and as a sculptural material she considers space and queerness through analog technologies, creating experimental topographies through photographic film and moving images. Bridging eco-processing, experimental film and queer history (both personal and political) she aims to create intimate experiences for viewers to expand their ideas of queer space and time.
Proof Yearbook was researched, digitized, and curated by Exhibitions and Publications Coordinator, Caeden Wigston.
