NEXTDOOR

Some of the works in this exhibition engage directly with the border—its geographies, infrastructures, and histories of migration. Others approach borders not as lines on a map but as the economic, cultural, or bureaucratic systems we inhabit. Several of these artists address more intimate and interior worlds, where boundaries are emotional, relational, and subjective. 

Robert Lyons photographs the border as an “undefended” space charged with quiet tension. In Untitled  (Avenue O British Columbia), 2016, an out-of-focus stop sign dissolves in color, the red reading less as command than as atmosphere, signaling a slip from authority into abstraction, a marker of both presence and disappearance. With where it happened, 2021, Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse reminds us that this demarcation of here/there is a relatively recent imposition, one that interrupts far older relationships to land, kinship, and sovereignty. His photograph of a backlit animal hide held by his mother and grandmother depicts a land shaped by wildlife, human figures, and the machinery of industrial and governmental encroachment. 

Power and dominion surface differently in Vikky Alexander’s Snowy Boardroom, where an imposing corporate interior is pictured in stark contrast to the environment it surveys. In Untitled, Eve Tagny stages a photograph of a friend, performer and collaborator, placing her body between representation and reality. Wearing both everyday clothes and hi-vis work pants, she leans against an advertisement for a future condo while its construction looms behind her, situating herself between labour and speculation, present and projected futures.

From opposite sides of the border, Bill McDowell and Michel Huneault trace historic and contemporary migrations of asylum seekers as they cross into Canada from the United States. McDowell’s images—a trap door that suggests hiding and escape, fragile still lifes of scraps of paper migrants have left behind—evoke erasure as well as persistence. Huneault documents moments of crossing and detention at the USA-CANADA border in which he fills the silhouettes of asylum seekers with textiles - donated to migrants on the road of the 2015 European crisis - shielding individual identities, and leaving only their shoes and luggage intact as markers of passage, peril, and absence.

Other artists reflect on notions of distance and separation, closeness and affinity. Photographs from Alec Soth’s Niagara travel from a motel’s red-doored rooms, a place of transit where strangers share the same walls, to words and pictures about home and family. Isabel Okoro imagines a universe of relations that transcends borders and reaches toward a speculative future shaped by love and freedom. Justine Kurland confronts idealized narratives of open landscapes and free movement through a queer, maternal lens, complicating myths about the West. And Kelli Connell challenges perception itself, presenting doubled figures whose similarities shift distinctions between self and other, like and unlikeness.

Ultimately, NEXTDOOR offers the outlines of a parallel yet paradoxical condition: a state of coexistence rooted in both proximity and distance. The exhibition uses this condition as a starting point to consider the border as a demarcation that is both real and conceptual. NEXTDOOR envisions an environment that is more shared than divided, where the lived experiences of neighbours unfold side by side, if unevenly, right next door.

—Emma Palm, Exposure Photography Festival, and Will Warasila, Strata Editions