May 2025
Spectra brings together new work by innovative members of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in an exhibition that represents a variety of different photographic concepts. As the name suggests the work demonstrates the many possibilities that are open to contemporary photographers and celebrates the diversity of artistic practice revealing the ways seemingly disparate work can intersect. Spectra, a changing collective of members, has been an active participant in CONTACT Photography Festival since its inception.
Ana Šašić, Anne Hanrahan, Anne Milne, Brian Hart, Courtney Fairweather, David Scriven, Gustavo Jabbaz, Ismayil Atmaca, Ivan Rupeš, Katherine Childs, Kexin Zhang, Kye Marshall, Lilianne Schneider, Lin Duperron, Linda Briskin, Nas Filho, Ross Stockwell, Stephen Della Casa, Tim Johnston
Curated by Shaney Herrmann
May 14th to May 25th, 2025
918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media and Education
March, 2024 Ana Šašić
Ana Šašić is a multidisciplinary artist with a lens-based and place-centered practice at the intersection of visual art and urbanism. She is interested in work that explores collective meaning rooted in public space. Current projects include a mixed-media installation collaboration in Belgrade. She is a member of Gallery 44, has exhibited in Canada and Europe, and lives in Toronto.
The Curtain Loops, 2024 Anne Hanrahan
Anne Hanrahan is a Toronto-based artist working in photography and mixed media, exploring architecture, motherhood, and AI to examine the evolving nature of home. Passionate about the interplay of form, shadow, and space, she investigates how built structures shape light and perception.
She holds a Master of Architecture from the Architectural Association in London, UK, and a Photography certificate from TMU in Toronto. In 2017, she participated as an independent artist in Nuit Blanche Toronto with Layered Cities, a maze-like installation that projected her photography onto architectural forms, reimagining urban landscapes. Her photography has been exhibited with Gallery 44, MTU, and OCAD’s Exhibition for the Contact Photography Festival (2018).
Prom, 2023 Anne Milne
Anne Milne is a peripatetic photographer currently living in Kitchener, Ontario. She has a certificate in graphic design from George Brown College and has participated in several group exhibitions, mostly in Hamilton.
Dreams, 2024 Brian Hart
Brian Hart Photography offers a unique perspective, using various types and genres to form a different viewpoint and make it his own. By combining portraiture and fashion, Brian Hart Photography allows the viewer to enter into a dreamscape. Hart has been in various group and solo shows over the years in Toronto, Guelph and Ottawa. His photography has also been seen in several publications.
Gold and Blue Macaws with Scarlet Cousins, 2024 Courtney Fairweather
Courtney Fairweather is a visual artist who experiments with a variety of media. Her work has been shown internationally in galleries and online.
Fairweather has a B.A. in English, a B.F.A. in Visual Art, and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics. She has had a career as a publicist as well as teaching English and Writing in universities in the Netherlands, Finland, and Canada.
Currently she studies painting, drawing, and printmaking at the Toronto School of Art.
Boundary Remains, 2024 David Scriven
David Scriven is a lens-based artist living in Toronto. Using cameras inherited from his father and grounded in documentary photography, his photographs have explored decay and renewal in the urban ecosystem. Common Ground, an ongoing project, emerged out of ancestry research started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Images from this series were recently featured at the Spectra 2024 group show at 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media and Education and in the online Montreal-based magazine Carte Blanche, Issue 46. He has exhibited work at the MacKendrick Community Gallery, Artscape Youngplace, Gallery 44 Centre of Contemporary Photography in Toronto, as well as ViewPoint Gallery in Halifax. In November 2021, he self-published a photo book entitled Alexandra Park that captured a year in the complete demolition and rebuild of the Toronto west-end community housing project.
Plaza de la Constitución, 2024 Gustavo Jabbaz
Gustavo Jabbaz is an urban photographer known for his vibrant digital collages that capture the energy of city life. He is self-taught in analog photography and transitioned to digital in 1998, embracing its creative potential. His work focuses on pedestrians, movement, and architectural facades. He layers hundreds of images to create surreal compositions that stretch to the edges of the piece, transforming everyday urban scenes into dynamic visual experiences.
Forbidden Shot, Washington DC, 2024 Ismayil Atmaca
Ismayil Atmaca is a Toronto-based street photographer and visual artist redefining photography through experimental techniques. His work blends black-and-white street photography with unconventional presentations, bridging tradition and innovation.
His Phucktography concept pushes boundaries by integrating mixed media and physical manipulation. The Glitch Series, central to this approach, deconstructs traditional photography by merging archival prints with wooden compositions, creating a fragmented, sculptural effect. He also incorporates burned paper, charcoal, and pastels, merging photography with raw, tactile materials.
Atmaca has exhibited at The Other Art Fair in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and New York City, and held a solo exhibition at Assembly Hall Gallery by the City of Toronto. His next major showcase, The Artist Project 2025, continues his mission to challenge how photography is experienced beyond the frame.
Wherever the Boot of a Russian Soldier, 2025 Ivan Rupeš
Ivan Rupeš is a Toronto-based documentary photographer. In his work Rupeš examines complexities of the human relationship with the environment. He is especially drawn to probing the nuances and ironies of the ways humans affect their habitat and the ways it affects them back. Rupeš was born in what is now Czechia. He started out as a biomedical researcher whose career brought him first to the USA and then to Canada. Currently, he takes on projects both in Canada and around the world.
Dream Space, 2025 Katherine Childs
Katherine Childs is an urban landscape photographer living in Toronto since 2002. Past work Includes documentary landscapes of the diverse places of worship found in Toronto’s suburban employment areas and a series that explores the semiotic codes used to communicate ethnic, class and social identity found in the front yards of downtown Toronto’s neighbourhoods. More recently she has been working with textiles, where screened photographic images are layered onto silk fabric. Childs has been in many group shows, including the numerous Gallery 44 Spectra shows, the Plus Arts Festival, DesignTO25 and “What She Said.” Childs has a BA from Reed College in Portland Oregon, a diploma from the undergraduate fine art program at the SMFA school in Boston, and an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Ceiling at Palau de la Música, 2024 Kexin Zhang
Kexin Zhang is an interior designer and an emerging artist who is engaged with multiple mediums of art. She is interested in people’s experiences of physical space and how art and design can be used to shape perception of such spaces. As a scuba diver, Zhang is also drawn to the unseen underwater world and strives to find ways to communicate her fascination with the aquatic world as well as preserve the oceans for future generations.
Zhang has previously curated a members-only exhibition at Gallery 44 titled Inside/Outside. She has worked on art installations around the Toronto Metropolitan University campus and for the Interior Design Show.
Posts on Posts, 2024 Kye Marshall
Kye Marshall is an eclectic composer and cellist who brings to her photography her experience, vision and discipline as a professional musician. She has studied with Freeman Patterson, Andre Gallant, and Tony Sweet. Her work is in multiple private collections, she has had solo shows at the Axis Gallery , Canadian Music Centre, Fairview Library, The Window Box, Yorkville Library and she has exhibited in multiple group shows. Marshall is also an eclectic photographer shifting from Nature to Portrait to Street photgraphy. She is currently exploring Iphone photography, Multiple Exposure Photography and Intentional Camera Movement. Her opera Pomegranate was presented by the Canadian Opera Company in June 2023.
Polaroid, 2024 Lilianne Schneider
Lilianne Schneider is a self-taught photographer, born and raised in Peru living in Toronto since the late 1980s. She is influenced by the rich experimental film scene in Toronto and her various travels abroad. They have forged her sensitivity to her environment. She is constantly looking for photographic subjects in the streets where society and the richness of the cultural landscape converge. Photography opens her mind to experiment and recreate the scenes that might go unnoticed to others. Her work has been shown by the Patrons for Arts of Peru at Toronto City Hall, at the Gallery of the Peruvian Consulate in Toronto and featured in group exhibitions at Columbus Centre (Toronto), PIX FILM Gallery, G44 365 exhibits (2018 and 2019), Low-Res show (2019) at G44, Covid-19 Portraits (2020) at Gallery 1313, Coming Home (2020) and Brave New World (2020) Group online exhibitions at Gallery 1313 and participated with Spectra group shows from 2019 to 2024.
Layered Light, Stoney Lake (Ontario), 2025 Linda Briskin
Linda Briskin is a fine art photographer in Toronto, intrigued by the juxtaposition of objects and reflections, the ambiguities in what we choose to see, and the permeability between the remembered and the imagined. She has a passion for nature and seeks lines, shadows, texture and reflections, and images that last only a breath. She often uses photo-collage and photo manipulation to construct unique and painterly images.
Briskin exhibits widely, has had numerous solo exhibitions, and participated in many group shows. Briskin’s images have been selected frequently for online juried shows. Recently for Urban Landscapes sponsored by NY Photo Curator (Honourable Mention), Abandoned at Chateau Gallery (Kentucky) and The Same But Different Exhibition sponsored by NY Center for Photographic Art (Honorable Mention). Her photographs have been published widely in literary journals and camera magazines. In 2024 The Hopper, an environmental literary journal published nine photographs in Briskin’s series Intimate Conversations.
Joker, 2019 Lin Duperron
Lin is an image creator who harnesses the power of photography to weave visual narratives. Attracted to the dramatic flair of a cinematic aesthetic, Lin embraces the versatility of both digital and analogue mediums to bring her visions to life.
She graduated from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography studies and an Independent Photography Diploma from Seneca College. Lin was born in Québec City but raised in Toronto, where she practices photography.
Teddy Bear, 2025 Nas Filho
Nas is a photographer based in Toronto whose signature black and white imagery captures the raw essence of contemporary life. As a member of Gallery 44 since 2019, his work has evolved from street photography to a more introspective visual language inviting conversations about pressing societal issues such as depression, the cost of living, affordable housing and mental health. His work is an engagement with human nature, reflecting the struggles of modern society.
Morning Light, 2025 Ross Stockwell
Ross Stockwell is an emerging artist based in Toronto, Ontario. His work is eclectic, and includes landscape, urban, dance and the human figure. He is attracted to visual oddity and the play of patterns and geometric forms. He explores states of being, felt-sense perceptions, and intuition in an inanimate context. Stockwell previously showed his work at Spectra 2022, Hutchison Road; G44’s Members Gallery (January 2023), Dissolution, and Spectra 2024, Astigmatic Variations, 2024.
Uncontained, 2015, Stephen Della Casa
Stephen Della Casa explores cultural and social issues through conceptual and abstract photography. Influenced by his European heritage, his work prioritizes artistic interpretation over unvarnished documentation. He earned a BFA in Photography from OCADU and received the Governor General’s Award for academic excellence. With law and fine arts degrees, his research-driven projects challenge conventional narratives. He examines history’s recurring patterns, capturing imperceptible but continually changing cultural shifts and their lasting impact.
Voices in the Void, 2024 Tim Johnston
Upon graduation from Mount Allison University in 1987 with a degree in Fine Arts, Tim Johnston accepted a scholarship to develop a photographic project in Mexico City. During the nineties, while teaching photography at international high schools, he participated in several major juried exhibits in Monterey, NL and Mexico City presenting large site specific photo-installations printed on translucent film (acetate). In 2001, Mr. Johnston returned to Canada where he continues to teach art at the middle school level and develop his visual art. Photography forms the core of his creative work. He has presented work at artist run galleries, Nuit Blanch, Contact Photography and several juried exhibits including Rodman Hall in St. Catharines and the Art Gallery of Mississauga.