Holding Space brings together the work of thirteen women who utilize photography as a way to engage with their surroundings. Through a range of lens-based approaches – from use of experimental analog processes to digital tools & techniques – these artists share a relationship with those physical, social, historical and cultural spaces that inform their creative investigations and lived experiences.

Image: Penelope Stewart, Beaver Pond, Orbs #5, digital photograph with hand-blown glass orb, 2013

Dianne Bos investigates light, nature, and perception using a wide range of distinctive photographic processes and tools. In creation of The Sleeping Green series (2014-16), Bos travelled through Belgium and France to photograph the sites where Canadian troops had fought during the Great War using a variety of vintage and pinhole cameras. Physical incorporation of objects from these sites alongside maps of stars and other ephemera through the printing process resulted in a series of images that embody the emotional depth of her experience and the lasting imprint of this tragic history.

Haven Carby is a keen observer of the details encountered in the environments of her daily life. The Farm series (2024) documents her explorations of a local, dormant farm property over the course of a single afternoon. Across the collection, Carby records playful interactions and discoveries amongst the deserted and rusted equipment found on the property; a hazy self-portrait in an old truck’s side-mirror, an unexpected glimpse of work boots, a landscape pictured through a rusted car door, a determined shrub.

Hazel May Eckert investigates how images are experienced. Her Soft Focus series (2019) is a collection of photographs taken from her iPhone in phases of signal disruption: people, places, and fragmentary moments in time captured as “failed”, frozen, partially-rendered and blurry. While commonly experienced as frustrating, Eckert rather considers the beauty in these mis-translated images and how cell phones and other digital technologies become unique collaborators in the documentation of our personal histories.

Sylvia Galbraith’s fascination with photography incites her continued experimentations with the unique properties of the medium. Her most recent series comprises of traditional silver-gelatin prints that have been modified using a bleach-etch, or mordençage process. Through manipulation of the lifted emulsion in the printing process, physical characteristics of the landscape scenes become altered, unstable, stretched and cloaked. The unpredictability in the results lends an inherent ephemerality to the work that Galbraith enjoys; a mirroring of a broader acceptance of changes outside of our control.

Oliva Gentil’s Hush series (2024) visually transcribes the bewildering and distressing experience of an anxiety attack. Involuntary muscle contractions, dizziness, tingling in the extremities and rapid blood pressure elevations demonstrate the potentially extreme physicality of anxiety attacks – a medical picture which Gentil has personally experienced throughout her life. Hallway presents a personification of these struggles: a monochromatically constricted corridor, a shaky aura of a moving figure, a teetering sense of space.

Sara Heinonen centers her photographic practice on her Hamilton, ON, hometown, recording the subtle particularities and shifts of the urban centre as driven by the continued movements of its residents, businesses, and infrastructure. Hamilton Vision Centre (2019) captures the fleeting overlapping elements of a window reflection from a shuttered optical service store. A dream-like scene reveals Heinonen as the photographer camouflaged by shadows, the silhouette of a striding suited figure, the clear-eyed gaze of an optical-wear model; the coalescing of the real/imagined, male/female, economic/aesthetic.

Christina Leslie portrays the complexities of migration, decolonization and ancestral memory through exploration of her Caribbean heritage and personal family histories. The photographs of her Morant Bay series (2019) were taken during Leslie’s return to her father’s hometown in Jamaica. Witnessing the structural, residential and economic decline of this rural enclave first-hand, she was moved to document the people and landscapes of the area. Driven by a sense of nostalgia, the images convey her empathetic and honest approach as she explored and reunited with the community of her familial roots.

Gillian Macdonald’s The Walls Around Me series (2023), reflects on her relationship with her childhood home and the perceptual changes in such a relationship when re-experiencing these spaces as a young adult. Joy’s Creation centres around a salon-style wall of family portraits. Contemplating her place within the family lineage whose lives and stories are framed along these walls, Macdonald positions herself physically into the collection behind a portrait of her Nana Joy whose life and character traits she sees increasingly reflected in herself.

Shelley Niro focuses her practice on the re-presentation of Indigenous identity within the contemporary context. Nature’s Wild Children presents a photographed landscape displayed across two perspectives of a scene from the natural environment of Niro’s ancestral Iroquois/Haudensaunee/Ogwahoowee territory. A singular cornstalk with its surrounding wildflowers represents the importance and respect for corn as a traditional, life-giving food, and is recognized by Niro and other members of the Indigenous community as a reminder of their history and connection with the land.

Dainesha Nugent-Palache explores the dichotomies and paradoxes inherent to representations of Afro-Caribbean femininities and Black diaspora. The starting point of her Others series (2012) was a recognized interest in ‘otherness’ and the spectrum of its perceived expression through changes in physical appearance. Embodying a range of imagined characters, Nugent-Palache documented her performed presence of these personalities in a variety of public spaces: the experience of being recognized and observed as ‘other’.

Isabel Okoro’s photographic practice supports the development and visualization of an imagined utopia, Eternity. Through this visual universe, Okoro shares stories that integrate real experiences of Black youth and Black diaspora community members with fictional narratives and ideas. Her Constructing Eternity series (from 2023) is a continuous, evolving project that reveals her world-building approach to this expanding universe and visualizations of the ways in which the community members of Eternity interact with each other and the spaces around them.

Penelope Stewart’s practice is informed from her close observation and interaction with environments encountered through her travels and daily life. During a 2009-10 residency at the Canberra Glassworks in Australia, Stewart created a small hand-held glass orb. Through her ensuing and ongoing Orb project, she takes images of the landscape through this glass orb, which used as a lens, becomes a hand-held camera obscura: inverting and bending the landscape into new visual experiences.

Jessica Thalmann leverages the 2-dimensional limits of photography to transcribe the multi-dimensional experiences of form. A focused interest around built, urban environments has grounded her investigations. Closely observing and photographing the structures and spaces that define and direct our movements through the city, Thalmann then reconfigures her structural subjects into abstracted image compositions. Through a fragmentation of form and perspective, Thalmann draws our attention to the experienced interactions of surface, texture, colour, and light.