Additional Images

Provenance:

Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Note:

THIS LOT CAN ONLY BE BID ON THROUGH ARTSY.NET

Like the earliest darkroom experimenters more than a century before him, Michael Awad appears to be equally committed to cataloguing his environment as reflecting on – and pushing – the photographic medium’s very limits. Scanning urban topographies, Awad, an architecture and urban design professor, has built his name on a long series of strata-like composites that picture a place, or the recurrence of a thing, like an archaeologist might lay out his findings, layer upon layer (or Eadweard Muybridge with his indexical focus on movement and the body). City streets are mapped (he’s photographed the entire length of Queen St. three times), parades and neighborhoods go inventoried. Awad carries a Foucauldian appreciation for genealogies and the vanity we suffer in their pursuit, particularly in his encompassing The Entire City Project (2014), which is exactly as ambitious as it sounds. For over a decade, Awad has been photographing “every facet of the urban experience in every city,” writes Canadian Architect. Awad uses custom-built photographic equipment, and applies techniques adapted from military aerial reconnaissance photography. The resulting ribbons read like film reels, presented as horizontal bands that unfurl images in sequence, with disruptions in focus, vantage point, and cropping to suggest changes in perspective, and subjectivity. Across Awad’s practice, the notion of “place-identity” is queried and unspooled.

Michael Awad has a Masters of Urban Design from University of Toronto, and a Masters of Architecture from Syracuse University, and has studied abroad in Florence, Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen. His solo exhibitions and commissioned projects include the Royal Ontario Museum, Pearson International Airport, Milan’s Brookfield Place, Chicago Cultural Centre, and Toronto’s Telus Building. He is represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery.