Opening Reception | Spring/Summer Exhibitions

Celebrate the start of a new exhibition season at The Image Centre and be among the first to experience:

Scotiabank Photography Award: Dawit L. Petros;
Larry Fink: Social Graces & Runway;
Jessica Slipp: Becoming Rock and;
Kenna Robinson: With My Whole Body.
Explore these compelling exhibitions, connect with artists and curators, and enjoy the evening with light refreshments and a cash bar.

Please have your Eventbrite registration and valid ID ready when you arrive. The name on your ID must match the name on ticket/registration list. All bags may be subject to inspection by gallery security upon entry.

About the Exhibitions
Scotiabank Photography Award: Dawit L. Petros
This survey exhibition celebrates the career of Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Dawit L. Petros, winner of the 2025 Scotiabank Photography Award. Spanning over 20 years, this presentation of more than 80 photographs, serigraphs, and books traces a long-standing inquiry into the legacy of colonial history across Africa, Europe, and North America. Rooted in rigorous scholarly research and extensive travel, Petros’s practice is defined by his creative use of archival photographs, colour, and abstraction. The artist challenges photography’s documentary function while investigating migration, belonging, displacement, and the lingering effects of colonial memory.

Larry Fink: Social Graces & Runway
Drawn from the collection of The Image Centre, this exhibition presents prints from two series by photographer Larry Fink: Social Graces and Runway. Shot between 1974 and 1982, Social Graces exposes America’s class divide by contrasting Manhattan’s urban high society with Pennsylvania’s rural countryside. Runway, photographed from 1993 to 1999 in Paris, Milan, and New York City, reveals the behind-the-scenes world of fashion shows and designer showcases, highlighting the chaotic operations and performative nature of fashion runways. Both series are defined by black-and-white tonalities and the artist’s signature use of flash.

Jessica Slipp: Becoming Rock
Canadian artist Jessica Slipp has been performing and filming in various environments for nearly a decade, following a consistent protocol in which she enters the frame, unfolds a sheet of paper printed with rock textures, camouflages her body beneath it, and then leaves the scene. Repeated 40 times in her ongoing video series Becoming Rock, this gesture unfolds across Canadian landscapes ranging from unspoiled seashores, lakesides, and forests to sites shaped by human activity, including industrial compounds, parking lots, woodyards, and extractive sites. At once disconcertingly comic and marked by hopelessness, the work raises questions of disappearance, transformation, and symbiosis, subtly shifting the gaze from the human to the landscape and nurturing an awareness of the surrounding elements to the point of imagining a possible lithified future.

Kenna Robinson: With My Whole Body
With My Whole Body explores the power dynamics of traditional portrait photography, where the operator often controls the image while the sitter has little agency. Responding to this, the artist merges photographer and subject using the cyanotype printmaking process. Rather than posing for a camera, the body physically touches a sensitized surface, creating images over extended exposures that capture presence and movement. Fabric cyanotypes are then sculpted into three-dimensional forms, combining fragments of the body to produce a tactile, collaborative image. The work challenges conventional photographic representation and invites viewers to reconsider authorship, presence, and recognition in portraiture.