The Essays

What Are You Looking At?
Allyson Clay and Eliza Griffiths, Encounters with the Gaze
Dee Gibson discusses artists Allyson Clay and Eliza Griffiths’ negotiation of the male gaze and insertion of subject positions for women. Vancouver-based Clay uses photography and text, reworking painting’s tradition of the odalisque to critique women’s problematic relationship to representation. Griffiths, an Ottawa-based painter, offers suburban vignettes occupied by “bad-girl” desiring subjects.

Face to Face
Portraits by Margaret Clarke, Rosalie Favell, and Aaron Anaïs Kimberly
Joanne Jefferson explores how early twentieth century Irish painter Margaret Clarke, and contemporary Canadian artists Rosalie Favell and Aaron Anaïs Keimberly use portraiture to challenge prescribed social boundaries and express their identity.

In/Visible Truths
The Photographic Work of Clara Gutsche, Adrian Piper and Allyson Clay
Audrey Nicoll examines how Clara Gutsche’s photographs of Quebec convent life and photographic self-portraits by Adrian Piper and Allyson Clay counter dominant representations of women as shaped by sexist, ageist and racist discourse.