galleryDK : Contemporary Urban Photography

galleryDK seeks to present photographic and photo-based work examining and exploring all facets of the urban experience. Not only in Toronto, but around the world.

We bring you images and issues of social and urban pertinence such as transportation, consumerism, poverty, built environments and the urban space.

OPENING THURSDAY JULY 2ND 2009 - LETHE / DETRITUS BY KAREN MOE

Lethe / detritus - Karen Moe

Named after the river that is drunk from to instill forgetfulness before one descends into Hell, Lethe addresses how what we forget creates who we are and thus forms cultural identity.

This exhibit at gallery DK combines two of Vancouver artist Karen Moe's photographic series "detritus: East Vancouver Alleyways" (2004) and "Lethe: a mock metaphysics" (2005). In 'detritus,' Moe documented found objects in alleyways as symbols of what is discarded in society and as traces of memory located in personal histories. The self-portraits of "Lethe: a mock metaphysics" is a response to Moe's own abduction and rapes; the art production and reception extends this personal distress into its societal context. By exhibiting these projects together, social and personal liminalizations echo each other in tangible ways.

As a visual context to the Lethe images, Moe will create a DVD loop of images composed of newspaper photographs of some of Vancouver's missing women along with their names and the dates of their disappearances. These women were literally vanishing as she created Lethe, a fact unknown to her and the majority of the Vancouver community at the time. But Lethe, being about memory and forgetting, can now become a memorial on many levels.

In this anguished elaboration of discarded things and disappeared women, Moe's exhibit articulates silences at the core of patriarchal culture and the social and spiritual necessity of memory's continuance.

Opening reception Thursday July 2nd, 2009 from 7pm to 10pm. Show open every Thursday to Sunday from 12pm to 5pm until July 26th, 2009.

galleryDK is booked for the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival 2010. The owners will be mounting a show of their own work. We thank you for your interest.