Cultural Turns

About

 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival presents American artist Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995) featured in a multi-faceted exhibition titled Cultural Turns that will include work on view at the CONTACT Gallery May 1 – June 30, 2022, as well as outdoor public installations at Toronto’s Metro Hall and on two downtown billboards. The project represents the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada and his first public installation work.

The project is organized by British curator and cultural historian Mark Sealy, PhD OBE, director of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers in London.

Mitchell is an American photographer who takes storytelling to uncharted territory with his work in fashion, documentary, and art photography, as well as film projects that include autobiographical topics and themes of identity. Mitchell refers to his practice as a “Black utopic vision, presenting these images in which the young Black men and women around me look dignified, are presented as a community, and also ask the tough questions in terms of what are the things we’ve been historically denied?”

Cultural Turns features a selection of 17 recent and new works by Mitchell at the CONTACT Gallery including Connective Tissue (2021), Tangled (2021), and Vastness (2021) presented as a 7.5 x 13 foot photo mural. Mitchell’s first major outdoor installation will feature a selection of his editorial, commercial, and art photography in 13 large-scale street-level panels on view at nearby Metro Hall. Mitchell’s work will also be presented on billboards for the first time in his career and feature Untitled (Sloane and Leo Embrace) (2019) and Untitled (Eyelash) (2019) at the Dovercourt and Dupont Street intersection in downtown Toronto. Cultural Turns reflects the range of emotions and situations that Mitchell captures in his portraits of Black people in the pastoral American south and the continuation of Mitchell’s exploration of situating a Black utopia in the everyday.