Following a summer hiatus, Robin Collyer’s exhibition re-opens at the AGYU for a limited showing before it begins its Canadian tour. This exhibition highlights thirty years of photography by one of Toronto’s most noted artists. It is the first major survey of Collyer’s photographic work, which to date has been overshadowed by his practice as a sculptor. The exhibition includes early black and white photographs, digitally retouched images, urban and rural landscapes, and a commissioned series of photographs depicting silos from the French centre of Orléans.

Collyer’s approach to photography is largely intuitive. His subject matter is the environment around him, the city streets, urban landscapes, and green spaces that he encounters on a daily basis. Photographed with a seeming casualness his compositions, upon first glance, appear to be arbitrary depictions of those everyday settings, of “non-places” as it were. But behind the straightforward appearances, subtle juxtapositions and transformations are at play. An unremarkable city street becomes eerily mute as you realize all traces of text have been removed from signage. A beer bottle resting in a tree disturbs an otherwise pastoral landscape. A simple black and white snapshot is transformed into a possible celebrity encounter. The photographs in this exhibition comment on the visual culture of our environment, and raise questions about how we receive and accept the imagery that inundates us daily.

An exhibition catalogue will be available September, 1999, featuring essays by Philip Monk and Frédéric Migayrou. Robin Collyer’s exhibition travels to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, and to the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa.