In: photos
Julianna D’Intino’s Connecting Rods | Mahtay Cafe | St. Catharines
October 26, 2022Julianna D’Intino’s Connecting Rods: A Survey of Industry in the Niagara Region, 2015 – 2022 is currently on display at Mahtay Café & Lounge in their main space.
The exhibition has been on display for two weeks and will be on display for two more, into the month of November.
This is the first in a series of curated exhibitions of Niagara based artists, that I’ve put together to show in the downtown of St. Catharines.
Connecting Rods, to cite the words of the artist, “is but one personal case study in the myriad of lost industry of the Niagara Region.”
Much more about this body of work can be seen here: https://juliannadintino.com/Connecting-Rods
I also offered some thoughts about this fine body of work for curated., which can be read here: https://curatednow.ca/julianna-dintino-connecting-rods-a-survey-of-industry-in-the-niagara-region-2015-2022/
This exhibition is exceptionally relevant right now, with the recent election where the fate of the old GM site was a topic of concern, and the legacy of that time – both in terms of the physical site but also the people who worked there, and the larger social and economic echoes – still resonates.
Come to Mahtay and experience Connecting Rods in person: it is as much history as it is art.
~Bart Gazzola
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Joyce Crago | City Hall Art Gallery | Ottawa
October 6, 2022“Not long after she’d lost her sister Hazel, I ran into Joyce, and we decided to go for lunch. We settled ourselves on stylish chairs, surrounded by hushed chitchat. At mention of Hazel, Joyce crumpled, as though the loss was physically crushing in on her. In that room of mannerly interaction, tears poured freely down her face.
Joyce Crago transmuted her uncontrollable private grief into an act of profound communication. She created this work without allowing any of the power and shock of that raw and overwhelming pain to be lost in the beauty of these pieces. They don’t only express that pain, they articulate it. In viewing, we share in it, and understand.
Crago is a master of composition, and her specialty is arranging what’s been discarded in the wake of major events. Salvaged, staged, and photographed, spent objects become in her hands visually gratifying forms, and the significance with which they are imbued is revealed, laid bare.”
– Exhibition booklet excerpt by Ruth Dick
Joyce Crago is a multi-media Canadian artist with a background in textiles and law. Her creative pursuits are initialized by a compulsion to ask questions about subjects such as death, aging, mortality, and cultural trauma. She attempts to bring order to these subjects under circumstances that are not propitious.
She was the recipient of the 2021 Project X, Photography Award. In 2020, her work appeared in a featured exhibition at the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and won the Grand Prize at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s RMG Fridays: Focused.
Her works were recently exhibited at the Ottawa Art Gallery and have also been shown nationally and internationally. They are held in the City of Ottawa Art Collection as well as many private collections.
Joyce Crago gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.
~ Mark Walton
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Julianna D’Intino | Connecting Rods: A Survey of Industry in the Niagara Region, 2015 – 2022
September 22, 2022Julianna D’Intino | Connecting Rods: A Survey of Industry in the Niagara Region, 2015 – 2022
To talk of the legacy of GM when you live in the city of St. Catharines is akin to how your tongue will always go to the gap in your teeth, seeking something that was there and now is not, leaving nothing behind but a perceptible absence you are unable to ignore.
Julianna D’Intino’s images, both moving and still – and I’ve been lucky enough to see several bodies of work she’s produced – often have a local focus, and in some ways she steps into that role of photographer as social historian. Often this involves her adjacent community in Niagara, exploring her own immediate heritage and circle. One such series can be seen here.
Connecting Rods: A Survey of Industry in the Niagara Region is a family story, as well as a local one. The ‘connection’ in the title of this series is not just a nod to an industrial interpretation, but also the families, communities and city that is part of a network that once had its epicenter in the abandoned wastelands D’Intino presents us with….and in her fine words about this series, D’Intino also draws connections to other areas with similar experience, such as with Atlas Steels or John Deere in Welland.
That potential for ‘nostalgia’ doesn’t mean what D’Intino is telling us is through rose – coloured glasses, nor does it gloss over the reality: her words about this work are as unflinching and honest – and engaging – as her photographs.
“This is but one personal case study in the myriad of lost industry of the Niagara Region. Would the return of the Niagara Region as a manufacturing hub provide a sustainable solution to the region’s economic woes? No, it would not. What is missing in the region is sufficient work at wages high enough to sustain a well-balanced life at the Niagara Region’s new inflated cost of living. The last time that such security was widespread was when manufacturing was a leading industry.”
The legacy of GM in St. Catharines is surely a contested narrative, with ground fertile for those from here – like D’Intino, or myself – to mine. It’s as rife as the industrial damage left behind at the site (an ongoing issue in civic politics here which has led to some grotesque and unsettling bedfellows), and there are differing opinions in play. Anna Szaflarski, for example, offers another perspective on this history here.
D’Intino’s site is here, and more images and D’Intino’s considered words about Connecting Rods can be found here.
~ Bart Gazzola
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