Additional Images

Provenance:

Courtesy of the artist.

The Work & Artist Bio

Figure as Index, 2019, is an inkjet print from the series of the same name. What the work suggests is that we question what it is, exactly. With layering and taping, the photograph yields up its reading as a fixed image, an indexical image, and not fixed, complete and final. The taping implies contingency. This work calls up the work of Moyra Davey and Ken Lum’s series, “Photo-Mirror” started in 1997, where the subject in the framed mirror is the viewer looking back at themselves while being looked back at by the faces in the small photos slipped under the edges of the frames. The shift and questioning in Figure as Index is Luther Konadu’s presenting photography — here, a still print — as very much a contemporary medium.

Luther Konadu is an artist and writer based in Winnipeg (Treaty One). His studio activities are realized through photographic processes that give way to sculptural components. He acknowledges the legacies of the photographic medium as an interpretive site for generating new conventions and expanding fixed narratives. Konadu’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Aperture, and FOAM International Photography Magazine. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; the Remai Modern, Saskatoon; The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver; SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montréal; Filter Space, Chicago; the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. In 2019 he was a winner of the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award from the National Gallery of Canada. In the same year he received the Salt Spring National Artist Prize and was the national winner of the BMO 1st ART! Competition. In 2020 he was a recipient of the Sobey Art Award. His work was exhibited in the form of a series of murals at Harbourfront Centre for the 2021 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Konadu’s work was the subject of a Borderview in Border Crossings (Issue 152). His recent solo exhibition “Luther Konadu: No Further” was mounted at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina from 2023–24.

Objective Portraiture, Border Crossings Issue 152, 2019