LAMENT : for altered, erased, and lost histories is curated by J.J. Kegan McFadden and features film, photography, installation, and video by artists from Canada, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom, including: Evergon (Montreal, PQ), Chris Curreri (Toronto, ON), Shawna Dempsey + Lorri Millan (Winnipeg, MB), Jenna Edwards (Toronto, ON), Tess Hurrell (London, UK), Jason Lazarus (Chicago, IL), and Cody Trepte (Los Angeles, CA).

The photograph, the image burned onto the paper surface as a means to keep forever a document for our collective memory is fallible. Employing a series of minimalist as well as fantastical strategies, the artists in LAMENT play with the supposed infallibility of the archived image from various perspectives. When considered together, the work in this exhibition suggest alternate strategies of how a photograph may offer information, and conversely how such information contained in the image may be presented as well as altered, erased, and perhaps lost.

As the banner exhibit for PLATFORM’s palimpsest year, LAMENT questions the failure of photography as a record of things remembered. Through provocative and poetic gestures, the work in this exhibit forces a re-reading of how we understand history and historical accuracy (if such a concept even exists), and ultimately privileges the experiential over the record.

— McFadden, curatorial synopsis