Surface Tension joins two bodies of photo-based work by Jessica Thalmann and Ryan Van Der Hout. Both artists use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss by simultaneously defacing and exalting filmic and photographic objects.

Thalmann’s series Utopos attempts to understand the relationship between Brutalist architecture and traumatic histories involving protest, shootings, and violence. The project began by focusing on the 1992 Concordia University shooting, where her uncle was killed. Reflecting on the emotional implications of his death and its reverberations throughout her family, the artist distorts images of cold, monolithic Brutalist buildings, folding the photographs to create sculptural reliefs and organic forms.

Van Der Hout’s body of work, Creative Destruction, explores ideas of modernization, progress, and loss by etching into the surface of photographs from the Toronto archives. Working with images from 1890 to 1916, a period of rapid modernization in the city, he physically strips away portions of the chemical emulsion to create marks that veil, alter, or erase the past.

For both artists, the complex relationship between memory and the archive becomes prevalent as seemingly precious photographs are folded, torn, scraped, rubbed, and cut, simultaneously erasing and preserving a past half remembered.

• Jessica Thalmann holds a Master of Fine Arts in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College and a BFA in Visual Arts from York University. Thalmann likes to mess with photography, to test its limits. Whether bending, tearing, tessellating or folding, she coaxes images of structural solidity (she has an abiding interest in brutalist architecture) to accommodate dimensional interventions to their representative, utopian angularity. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Aperture Foundation, International Centre for Photography, and Humble Arts Foundation (New York); VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver); Varley Art Gallery of Markham (Markham); Art Gallery of Mississauga and Blackwood Gallery at UTM (Mississauga); Museum of Contemporary Art, Harbourfront Centre, and Gallery TPW (Toronto).

• Toronto-based artist Ryan Van Der Hout’s work has been widely featured in publications including The Huffington Post, Vogue Italia, CBC, and Reader’s Digest. He has exhibited across Canada, the United Kingdom, and New York, and most notably in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Collectors Series; as part of a Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Featured Exhibition; and in The Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward festival. Van Der Hout has created public art for the Toronto Archives, The TTC, Nuit Blanche, and Pemberton Developments; was awarded the Emerging Artist Award by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery; and has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Ryerson University.