Ruth Kaplan & Claudia Fährenkemper Body/Armour
The exhibition Body/Armour juxtaposes the work of two photographers who have, respectively, explored the disparate subjects of exoskeletons and the ritual of bathing. Presented together for the first time, photographs by Claudia Fährenkemper and Ruth Kaplan each highlight unexpected aspects of the other’s work. Kaplan’s human subjects appear more vulnerable when contrasted with the protective plant, insect, and human-made casings featured in Fährenkemper’s images, while those second skins remind the viewer of the extent to which people will seek self-preservation.
During the late 1980s, German photographer Claudia Fährenkemper photographed in the deserts of the American West, creating impressive studies of the earth’s surface. She later found a similar variety of shapes in the rocks, canyons, and deserts of Germany’s vast landscapes of open-cast lignite mines—mines created using huge machines that cut through and remove the earth’s surface to extract the coal beneath. Fährenkemper documented these same machines in great detail with a large-format camera in her series Fördergeräte im Braunkohletagebau (1990–91). Comparing two of these images—one depicting a massive shovel wheel with human workers as a point of reference for scale, and the other, a micro-turbine, a piece of machinery as small as a grain of dust, which employs an insect as a scale reference—sparked the creation of a new cosmos of works.
Over the next ten years, Fährenkemper used a scanning electron microscope to create her various microphotographic series exploring the structures of the smallest things at magnifications of 25x to 3000x. The images present insects’ heads and plants’ seeds in an ancestral gallery of the microcosm, in which the diversity and individuality of these small life forms, protected by shells and capsules, becomes recognizable. The natural shells form counterparts to the magnificent European suits of armour that Fährenkemper brings to life in her black-and-white “portraits.” After several years of photographing such items in various museums’ collections, she became fascinated by the cultural heritage embedded in the armour worn by the Japanese Samurai, armour which she portrays using a large-format camera, in order to capture the items’ unique materiality and detail.
Canadian documentary-based photographer Ruth Kaplan’s photographic journey began in the nudist hot springs of California in 1991. By participating in the baths herself, Kaplan gradually became accepted by and was able to make photographs of her fellow bathers, occupying the dual role of participant and voyeur. From California she travelled to Eastern Europe, seeking more traditional forms of the ages-old practice in the spa towns of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. The candid display of widely varying body types and people of all ages became a major component of the work, as did her framing of the scenes, featuring the decaying architecture of the baths’ sometimes ancient interiors.
Kaplan later travelled to more modern spas in Germany, France, Italy, and Denmark, completing this long-term series in 2002 in the hammams of Morocco and the hot springs of Iceland—hedonism, sensuality, innocence, and social bonding are some of the underlying themes that emerge throughout the project. Made using a medium-format camera, Kaplan’s compositions position the baths as theatrical backdrops within which human behaviour is explored, as expressed through the body.
Both artists’ series convey a fascinating, shared duality—in the bathing ritual itself and in Kaplan’s sympathetic documentation of it, and in Fahrenkemper’s detailed micro and macro worlds—each image oscillates between a deeply grounded physicality and an ethereal state of transcendence.
Curated by Stephen Bulger and Shin Sugino
Presented by Stephen Bulger Gallery in partnership with the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, Toronto. The JCCC Gallery is a space committed to multi-disciplinary programming encompassing visual arts, design, performing arts, and literature.
Ruth Kaplan (b. 1955, Montréal, Canada) is a documentary-based photographer whose work integrates still photographs and video and explores a variety of themes such as the social behaviour of bathers in communal hot springs, congregants participating in rituals of spirituality, and, most recently, refugees living in shelters along the Canada-US border as they await decisions on their pending status. Work from Kaplan’s series Some Kind of Divine (2000–10) and Bathers (1991–2002) can be found in numerous private and corporate collections in Toronto, as well as across Canada, and in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Kaplan has exhibited internationally and is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery. Her editorial work can be found in major Canadian and international publications, she has received numerous grants and awards and is currently an instructor at OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and University of Toronto Scarborough.
Claudia Fährenkemper (b. 1959, Castrop-Rauxel, Germany) has used photography for over thirty years to explore the strange beauty of manmade or natural objects by isolating them in some way from their environment. She studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1989 until 1995 and has since produced series in landscape, machinery, photomicroscopy, and most recently, formal portraits of 15th- to 19th-century suits of armour. Since 1989, Fährenkemper has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and Asia. Her work has been collected by museums of art, as well as by museums of history, including the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; GoEun Museum of Photography, Busan, Korea; Sprengel-Museum, Hannover, Germany; and the Musée de L’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland. Fährenkemper is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Stephen Bulger (b. Toronto, 1964) engaged in photography as a hobby throughout his youth. Eventually studying at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Image Arts, he became interested in the history of photography and began organizing exhibitions. He was asked to be the founding director of the Ryerson Gallery (located at 80 Spadina Ave., Toronto) where he sat on the exhibition review committee and managed over thirty exhibitions. After graduating from TMU with a BA in 1991, he worked in the photography department of OCADU and began working on the idea of opening a gallery of his own. While employed as a Technician at OCADU, he opened Stephen Bulger Gallery (700 Queen St. West, Toronto) on March 23, 1995; moving to 1026 Queen Street West in 2004, and to 1356 Dundas Street West in the fall of 2017. Since that time, he has curated over 300 exhibitions, represented numerous Canadian and international photographers, published catalogues and books, and participated in many North American and European art fairs. He is on the Board of the Art Dealers Association of Canada, as well as the Canadian Art Foundation. He served as Chair of the Advisory Board for the Image Centre at TMU, Toronto; President of the Board for the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), Washington, D.C.; and the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board. He is also a co-founder of CONTACT, Toronto’s annual photography festival.
Shin Sugino (b. Osaka, Japan) emigrated to Canada at the age of 19 to study Photography and Cinema at Ryerson University in Toronto (1968–71). He began his career as a Fine Art Photographer, supplementing it as a Lecturer in the Fine Arts Department of Toronto’s York University. From 1980 to 1986, he specialized as a freelance stills photographer for feature film production in Canada, USA, Spain and Austria. In 1986 he began his advertising studio, Sugino Studio, and has expanded his repertoire to include directing live action TV commercials. Sugino’s editorial work has appeared in Toronto Life, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Camera Canada, Camera Mainichi, and in the Time-Life Photography Book Series. Commercial clients include General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Mazda, Nissan, Toyota, Lexus Kodak, Fuji, Nikon, Canon, Telus, Panasonic, Guinness, Molson, Labatt, and Tim Horton’s. Sugino has won international awards including advertising gold at the Cannes Film Festival (1998, 2002) and Cyber Gold (2006). Other acclaim has come from The One Show, The Advertising & Design Club of Canada, Applied Arts, Photo District News, Communication Arts and Luerzer’s Archive. His work is held in the collections of the National Film Board, National Archives, Ontario Arts Council, Banff School of Fine Art, and many private collections. In 2018 he was awarded Life Time Achievement Award by Advertising Club Of Toronto. In 2020 he was inducted into Toronto Metropolitan University’s Image Arts Hall of Fame. He has been a member of Royal Canadian Academy since 1998. The last several years of Sugino’s practice have been devoted to the wet collodion process, platinum printing, and photopolymer gravure.
Curated by Shin Sugino, Stephen Bulger
