Opening of the exhibit “Uno Prii.” Photos by William Eakin, Leala Hewak, and Craig Rodmore

Thursday, March 7 at 7pm, the photography exhibit Uno Prii with photos by William Eakin, Leala Hewak, and Craig Rodmore will be opened. The book on the architecture exhibit from 2017 – To the New World: Estonian Architects in Toronto – will also be released.

In English.

Admission by donation.
Info: piret.noorhani@vemu.ca,
t. 416 925 9405

William Eakin

William Eakin was born in Winnipeg in 1952. He studied at the Vancouver School of Art from 1971 – 74, and subsequently for a year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Other than a five year period during which he worked in the film industry (including a brief period as a film and sound editor with CBC Winnipeg and the NFB), and some time spent teaching photography at the University of Manitoba, he has worked exclusively on his photography. Eakin has had more than 50 one-person shows over the course of his career and has participated in an equivalent number of group exhibitions. He has been the recipient of a number of Canada Council grants, as well as grants from the Manitoba Arts Council. He was awarded the “Arts Award of Distinction” by the Manitoba Arts Council, in recognition of his lengthy and significant contribution to the arts in Manitoba. The award is given annually, across the complete range of artistic disciplines, to the province’s most important artist.

Eakin has traveled extensively and has produced individual bodies of work out of that mobility. In the early 1980s he was the Fine Arts Advisor to the Sanavik Co-op in Baker Lake, Nunavut, from which he developed documentary photographs that measure being both inside and outside the psychic and physical space of the North. This position is a characteristic one for Eakin, who seems continually to situate his work along a fault line of belonging and otherness, of incorporation and alienation. Eakin’s photographs are never sentimental but they are always emotionally compelling. He keeps us as viewers, and himself as the view-maker, off-balance. He shares this sense of fomenting instability with Robert Frank, whose documentary work constitutes a variation of encoded self-portraiture (and who has himself commented favourably on Eakin’s work).

Eakin has worked with a number of different formats and types of photography. His images are both taken and found. Throughout forty years of making photographs, he has sustained a commitment to, and a fascination with, subjects and objects that are normally undervalued and overlooked. In many ways his photographic practice has been a process of retrieval and re-evaluation and, at its core, it contains a deeply held ethical dimension. His world is one in which carefulness, in the word’s root meaning (i.e. to be full of care), is operating without limitation.

William Eakin has exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, Australia, The Netherlands, Japan and Taiwan. There is an extensive body of writing about his work. In 1996 he was awarded the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography, a prize administered by the Canada Council. Mr. Eakin is represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto.

Photo by Lulu Akhanamoya

Leala Hewak

Leala Hewak is a Toronto-based photographer. She obtained a BFA from York University, and went on to law school. She continued her art practice throughout her law career, founding Cream Galleryin Winnipeg, Manitoba in 2004. In 2017, Hewak obtained an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University in Toronto. She is the recipient of Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council awards, and has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. “Brightview,” a show at Project Gallery in Toronto with William Eakin, Craig Love and Cliff Eyland, was listed by NOW Magazine as one of the top 25 shows to see in the 2015 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Hewak’s upcoming installation “Clone” opens May 2 at Tangled Gallery in Toronto, a featured exhibit in the 2019 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Link: https://scotiabankcontactphoto.com/festival-2019

Craig Rodmore

Craig Rodmore takes pictures, makes books, etc.