"State of Play" exhibition vernissage + zine launch at Art House Cafe — Thursday April 11th, 7pm

Mark your calendar 🗓️

In keeping with my completely erratic publishing schedule on Substack, here I am two months later to let you know about a new exhibition at Art House (555 Somerset St West), with a vernissage Thursday April 11th 7-10pm.

More details: Free of course; no tickets required (though it might run up against capacity limits? And we might be outside as well?); I’ll be playing an improv set with local cellist extraordinaire Raphael Weinroth-Browne (consider having to listen to me play your price of admission?), and twenty-five copies of a broadsheet zine containing the exhibition will be available—just show me a $25 donation to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at the event.

And for the curatorial nerds: Archival rag paper and tempered glass. ✅ 🤓

Printing, curating, and exhibiting is a really good chance to look in the mirror for a minute and ask some hard questions—does what I’m producing matter? And to whom? Is there any soul to this stuff? (Of course there is in the subject matter, but am I conveying it with any justice?) Is there anything here that might last?

One thing I knew I didn’t want to do was put up concert photos, as dynamic and fun as they can be. (And there’s a home for these already, at Red Bird.)

No, this exhibition is about relationships within the creative community here in Ottawa, and between artists and audiences. (Sometimes, quite literally—four out of the twenty images are artists who are also couples!) Some I have known for over a decade, some a period of years; some I’ve met only once, but that in itself can make the encounter and its resulting document interesting.

Many are portraits, but sometimes the image is more about documentary—in the studio or on the street. Some are film photos—and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve managed to wrangle from that medium—and most are digital. You have to wonder, though—20% of the images are film, which is an outstanding batting average if you balance the number of film frames I’ve taken versus the number of digitals. I really do believe in the creative sense of purpose and productive friction that shooting film inculcates as a working method, apart from the arguments about aesthetics and authenticity.

There’s an improbable ridiculousness to how we got here. I tried to share that in my bio for the exhibition:

Curtis Perry is a relative outsider in the world of photography, having first picked up a camera mid-pandemic, in May 2021. Despite this, he's since been published in the Globe and Mail, multiple music publications, and perhaps most curiously had his picture of Thom Yorke end up in a German men's lifestyle magazine. His attraction to musicians stems from his background in music, and since then he's also branched out and come to truly appreciate all the arts in turn. His camera has taken him backstage with the likes of Margaret Atwood and Herbie Hancock, and over the years he has developed a notorious reputation for turning around images on a dime, making a compelling argument that quality can somehow coincide with quantity. Sarah Slean has called him "an artist with the camera", and NACO conductor Alexander Shelley has on multiple occasions called him "a wizard". However, Curtis takes the most pride in the various relationships he's forged in our local arts scene, most in his element when unnoticed at Art House on jazz night, or on a just-for-fun portrait shoot with a friend with his Mamiya film camera. And that's what this exhibition is about.

Mild self-effacement aside, I’m well aware of the world of luck I’ve had these past few years, and I’m determined to meet it by continuing to work hard, and to give back to and build community.

Should be a nice time—hope to see you there.