two truths and a lie is Jessica Thalmann’s first solo exhibition in a public art gallery and exemplifies the breadth and depth of her lens-based practice. The installation meditates on the slippery nature of the photographic object in a series of folded steel and paper sculptures and wall-mounted “straight” and physically altered photographs.

Thalmann crosses disciplinary boundaries and uses the poetics of space to understand spatial and pictorial relationships. She ruminates on the porous boundary between object and image; exploring the ways ruins, monuments, and abandoned public squares embody the failed utopian aims of Brutalist architecture. To Thalmann, a monument, much like a photograph, is never itself; it is inextricably caught between its meaning and its being. The intention for both photographs and monuments is to embody the objects, places, or people they depict, yet they remain silent and inert. They often make visible what cannot be seen, and erase or obscure what is real.

In many ways, their mnemonic possibilities are troubled by their material limitations. Fabrications, Thalmann’s most recent investigation, further troubles the relationship between image and object—as freestanding, double-sided sculptures (using only one cut and one fold as a conceptual guideline) these photographs stand upright, with only the floor as support.

Jessica Thalmann: two truths and a lie is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Curated by Anik Glaude

• 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).