Friday May 17, 7pm
McNally Robinson Booksellers, 1120 Grant Ave., Winnipeg, MB
ASL interpretation will be provided.
Join us for an evening at McNally Robinson Booksellers with acclaimed photographer David McMillan to celebrate the launch of his new photobook from Steidl, Growth and Decay: Prypiat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and to view his Martha Street Studio Edition Parquet Floor Variations, Prypiat, Ukraine. This event is presented by Martha Street Studio and features the artist in conversation with Border Crossings.
This event is free to attend and open to the public. The presentation will be followed by a book signing.
David McMillan began his career as a painter, receiving an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973, but gradually became more involved with photography. A concern for the vulnerability of the environment led him to photograph in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the site of what is considered to be the world's worst nuclear accident. Having returned to the site over 20 times since 1994, Growth and Decay serves as a record of McMillan’s lifetime commitment to this monumental project. As McMillan has explained: "When I first ventured to Chernobyl in 1994, the experience was thrilling and totally absorbing. I felt I had found a subject both inexhaustible and consequential. I wanted to make photographs describing something I hadn’t seen before, which had the potential to be simultaneously beautiful and unsettling."
McMillan taught photography at the University of Manitoba for 39 years and has had over thirty solo exhibitions since 1980 and some sixty selected publications, including catalogs for such major surveys as Photography in Canada 1960–2000 (National Gallery of Canada, 2017) and Camera Atomica (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015). His work has been featured internationally with showings in Hong Kong, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), Iceland, Finland, Israel, Australia, China, Germany, and the USA.
Martha Street Studio Editions are limited edition prints and folios, created in a number of different techniques and in innovative ways. They are made by studio technicians and the artist, and include etchings, screen prints and digital works. The Studio Editions include artwork by Manitoban artists including David McMillan, Daniel Barrow, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Aganetha Dyck, Simon Hughes, and Wanda Koop. Studio Editions are viewable on our webstore.
Border Crossings is a quarterly cultural magazine edited and published in Winnipeg. A local, international magazine, it is now in its 37th year of continuous publication. Edited by Meeka Walsh, it investigates contemporary culture through a combination of articles, reviews, interviews and portfolios of photographs and drawings. More curated than edited, Border Crossings occupies a vital place in the geographic centre of the North American continent.
Steidl is one of the most respected printers in the international publishing world. In 1994, Steidl launched its international photobook program. Today it includes some of the world’s most renowned photographers and artists including Joel Sternfeld, Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Karl Lagerfeld, Lewis Baltz, Dayanita Singh, Ed Ruscha, Roni Horn and Juergen Teller.
Martha Street Studio gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council for their dedicated support of our professional programming, and thanks Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba for their assistance with this event.