Michael Schreier, Untitled, from the series Disappearing Numbers…, 2007–2009, Ultrachrome Ink-Jet Print on Epson Ultrasmooth Fine Art Paper, courtesy of the artist and Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa

Ottawa-based photographer Michael Schreier is known for his poignant exploration of the limits of words and images. Focusing on transitional spaces, momentary encounters,and the poetics of loss and abandonment, his photographs invite viewers into a spiritual communion with the mundane. Somewhere between monuments and anti-monuments, these luminous, carefully composed images address fleeting, marginal subjects-the architectural details of modern exhibition spaces or the faces of strangers met randomly on the street-investing them with a quiet majesty. Schreier's solo exhibition Storyteller/Waiting for Words represents the culmination of several years spent exploring the æsthetics of witness, with particular reference to his birthplace, Vienna. Made up of two distinct, yet interconnected bodies of work-interiors and street portraits-the exhibition is anchored by Or-Sarua (2009), a powerful new photographic installation named after a Viennese synagogue that was destroyed in a 1420 pogrom of Austrian Jews. Partly inspired by Barnett Newman's The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (1966), this complex work focuses on a staircase that links the remains of the synagogue to Vienna's Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, the Nameless Library (2000) designed by British artist Rachel Whiteread.

As with so much of Schreier's work, the quiet elegance of Or-Sarua belies a storm of complex and provocative associations, including the relationship between Holocaust representation and American abstraction; the seven candles of the temple menorah and the Passion of Christ; the entire history of Jewish persecution obscured by the horror of Auschwitz; and the suffering of Jesus as a Jew prefigured by Job. Despite this challenging complexity, the goal of Or-Sarua is relatively simple. Like Newman's The Stations of the Cross, it seeks to visualize what French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once simply called "the disaster"¹- a moment of extreme exteriority that begs an ancient and unanswerable question: lema sabachthani, "Why have you forsaken me?"

- Emily Falvey, Exhibition Curator

¹ Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

Events

Opening
Thursday 10 September at 5:30 pm

Talk with artist Michael Schreier (in English)
Thursday 1 October at 3:30 pm

Podcast

Talk with artist Michael Schreier

Part 1

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Part 2

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