George Steeves

Little Histories of Modern Art brings together eight contemporary artists whose photographic and videographic works critically and affectionately reconsider the practices and ideologies of Modern Art.

Excavations illuminates George Steeves’s fascination with the human condition. His black and white photographic portraits and self-portraits border on the Surreal, where truth and fiction are intertwined. The Surrealists’ obsessions with chance encounters and secret desires is extended in the accompanying texts.

The works of these eight artists playfully revisit the histories of Modern Art, evoking its undiminished power on the Postmodern imagination.

George Steeves has been a practising chemical photographer for thirty years. The human condition has been his preoccupation: real or imagined; genuine or false; beautiful or tasteless. His subjects are lovingly rendered in luminous black and white in ways that maximize, dramatize, exalt, or degrade. The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography presented a retrospective of his work in 1993. The series Equations toured Scandinavia in 1995−96. Steeves has devoted the last five years to a project known as Excavations. It digs up and examines his collaborators’ exceptional secrets, pathological fantasies, and grotesque illusions.

Espaces Art Mûr
5826 St. Hubert Street
(514) 390-0383
Little Histories of Modern Art. Jakub Dolejš, Colwyn Griffith, Holly King, Alain Pratte, George Steeves, Jian-Xing Too, Helen Verbanz, and Laurel Woodcock
September 8 – 28, 2005
Tuesday & Wednesday 10:00am-6:00pm, Thursday & Friday 12:00-8:00pm, Saturday 12:00-5:00pm Opening Thursday September 8, 2005 from 5:00-8:30pm, most of the artists will be present