BACKGROUND

Landscape has been a long-established genre in painting and drawing, shaped by its historical importance in Eastern and Western traditions. These panoramic views of natural, built, or imaginary environments have helped inform and preserve individual and collective memories, narratives, and geographical identities. With the introduction of film photography in the 19th century, the representation of place could be generated accurately, and thus rendered “objective” in comparison to a painting or drawing. In turn, photography’s documentational ability has also made it an ideal tool — one that is especially popular in the domain of advertising and commerce. 

Since the founding of the first modern travel agency in the mid-18th century (Webster et al. 8), the tourism industry has relied on evocative images and descriptions of destinations near and far to entice potential travellers, a practice that continues to be sustained by the demands of an ever-increasing globalized world (Webster et al. 469-475). These images are highly impressionable, eliciting a desire to insert oneself against the backdrop of a foreign setting, which is often externalized as idyllic, exotic, alluring, and inspiring. Yet, this internal rhetoric of being somewhere else — what sociologist John Urry refers to as “the tourist gaze” (2-4) — is a mere idealization that, more often than not, isolates the tourist from the socio-cultural, economic, and political conditions affecting a foreign environment. 

Travel / Agency brings together four contemporary artists who reconceptualize fixed representations of place (i.e. landscapes) as a method of articulating the nuances of environment that are mostly filtered out of mainstream tourism marketing. Serving as counter-narratives, the works of Nikhil Chopra, June Clark, Rosalie Favell, and Reena Saini Kallat consider not only physical geography but also the histories, lived experiences, and relationships of a place’s inhabitants. In addition, the exhibition prompts viewers to consider the following questions: What can a landscape of a beach, countryside, forest, city, etc. tell us about what is not being captured? How does mass tourism affect the agency of locals who are often absent from travel marketing? What do our individual gazes reveal about our gaps in knowledge about other people and ourselves? 

THE SPACE

This proposed group exhibition will feature a combination of performance, photography, collage, and installation. Emulating a travel agency office, the exhibition space will have a “storefront” that blends in its surroundings, ideally in a commercial area (e.g. a plaza or strip mall). In lieu of listings for flights, accommodations, and other travel services, the storefront will showcase a performance that invites passersby into the space. For the exhibition’s title, I chose to do a wordplay on “travel agency,” whereby the words are separated by a slash to indicate a conflict between the agency of people overseas and those seeking leisure and respite abroad.  

Displayed behind the storefront window is an off-white wall (20 feet wide and 7 feet tall) where a commissioned artwork by Nikhil Chopra will be performed and subsequently displayed; located on the other side will be the exhibition’s introductory panel. Further, the interior of the “travel agency” will have three additional walls (at least 25 feet wide and 10 feet tall) that can accommodate the other works by June Clark, Reena Kallat, and Rosalie Favell.

ARTISTS

Nikhil Chopra

Nikhil Chopra is an Indian artist known for incorporating performance with drawing, painting, and installation, often under the guise of an alter ego that is inspired by familial, historical, and political figures. His performances are carried out over the course of several days, and the resulting artwork is typically a massive landscape, such as the one produced for the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Lands, Waters, & Skies in 2019 (see photo above).

A defining characteristic of Chopra’s work is its ability to animate traditional art mediums, which makes the placement of his commissioned performance at a storefront window quite effective. By applying this method, Chopra is able to transform the traditionally static landscape into a self-directed and self-defined representation of place. Moreover, his activated images have a critical lens; for example, he often examines the Othered body, identity politics, and the influence of dominant ideologies. Chopra’s bodily presence enacts agency — in his commissioned work for this exhibit, the encounter between the artist and audience will negate the tourist gaze by disrupting the viewer’s (i.e. the tourist’s) inclination to idealize the depicted place in question. Furthermore, by shifting our attention to other realities and experiences beyond the frame, Chopra’s live performance also questions the passive consumption of images many of us have become so accustomed to.

June Clark

Based in Toronto, Ontario but born in Harlem, New York, June Clark’s experiences growing up in both cities have influenced her interdisciplinary works, which are themed around Black diasporic identities, histories, and memories. As one of North America’s largest cities, Toronto has undergone rapid growth, and its changing landscape is perhaps best reflected in Clark’s street photography — in particular, three black and white photos taken between 1976 and 1984. 

These untitled photos document moments of private and public life in Toronto during the 70s and 80s. In particular, the photograph Untitled, c. 1984 is notable for featuring a sight familiar to locals today: a zoning sign. This particular sign proposed a new apartment to be built in Toronto’s North York district, which from 1961 to 1980 had an upsurge in 5+ storey buildings than any other building type (“Community Council Area Profile North York” 5, 12-13). Nowadays, buildings with 5 or more storeys represent the majority of new developments across Toronto. The vandalism that defaces the sign is a common response to urban renewal (or decay), a phenomenon that continues to be a polarizing topic among the city’s residents. Despite Toronto being cited as one of the world’s most livable cities (Myers), such rankings generally disregard pressing micro-level factors in the analysis. For instance, the rankings make no mention of structural and systemic barriers — such as the lack of affordable housing, rising costs of living, or funding cuts to public services — and their significant impacts on people in Toronto.

Rosalie Favell

Rosalie Favell is a Winnipeg-born artist whose body of work is grounded in ideas about the past, present, and future from a contemporary Métis perspective. Land is a reoccurring subject in Favell’s work as it is intrinsically tied to Indigenous concepts of identity, community, and self-determination.

Wish You Were Here (2011) is a series of ten collages about Favell’s late grandmother who, like Favell, was an avid photographer. In each collage, photographs of Favell’s grandmother taken in various places and times are superimposed onto Favell’s own photos of the same places in the present day. This technique of contrasting family photos and narratives with empty scenes can be interpreted as subverting the notion of terra nullius, a colonial doctrine that claimed the American continents as unoccupied or unfrequented — thus justifying its subjugation, settlement, and exploitation by European colonial powers. By combining elements of portrait and memoir, these collages reflect the continuity of Favell’s personal and familial histories while also challenging misconceptions about land, ownership, and Indigeneity.

Works Cited

“Community Council Area Profile North York,” City of Toronto, 2021, https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/8ce5-CityPlanning-2021-Census-Profile-North-York-CCA.pdf

“June Clark: Photographs.” Daniel Faria Gallery, www.danielfariagallery.com/exhibitions/photographs. Accessed 22 Feb. 2024.

Myers, Joe. “These Are the World’s Most Liveable Cities.” World Economic Forum, 30 June 2022, www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/liveable-cities-urbanization-vienna/.

“Nikhil Chopra.” Galleria Continua, www.galleriacontinua.com/artists/nikhil-chopra-17. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.

“Siamese Trees, 2018-2019.” Reena Saini Kallat, www.reenakallat.com/siamese-trees-2018-19/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2024.

Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed., Sage Publications, 2002.

Webster, Don, et al. Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in BC, 2nd Edition, BCcampus, 4 June 2021, www.opentextbc.ca/introtourism2e/. 

“Wish You Were Here (2011).” Rosalie Favell, www.rosaliefavell.com/portfolio/wish-you-were-here/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.