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I am back from a quick trip to Toronto to see one of my favourite artists, American singer/songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, who performed two sold-out shows at the Scotiabank Arena.
The shows on her Lost Tour — in support of her just-released third album Lost Weekend — are phone free, and I will have more about that experience (and why I think all concerts should make you lock away your phone) in my column on Saturday.
Here, though, I want to talk about something you might be able to see if you are in Toronto sometime between now and next summer, which is Melissa Auf der Maur’s photo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Auf der Maur is the Montreal-born bassist for the influential ’90s grunge band Hole, fronted by Courtney Love, and later the Smashing Pumpkins. But she also has a fine-arts background, and was a photography major at Concordia. My ’90s Rock Photographs boasts more than 200 photographs, many of them intimate, proto-Instagram documents of life on tour.
Melissa Auf der Maur’s photo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Jen Zoratti / Free Press)
I have been a fan of the flame-haired musician since I was a teenager; I loved Hole, and I felt a lot of Canadian pride knowing she was from here (I believe in the liner notes of 1998’s Celebrity Skin, each band member was represented by a little icon and hers was the maple leaf).
Auf der Maur’s photos, especially her selfies and her photos of the famously mercurial Love, are so beautiful they cracked something open in me.
They are such moving documents of young womanhood and nascent creativity, of just-trying-something artistic experiments. But they are also such stunning examples of the female gaze — turned both inwards and outwards.
These shots aren’t about capturing someone at their most flattering angle, nor are they about being sexy or pretty, though some are inevitably, unavoidably both; rather you get the sense that Auf der Maur really sees her subject, whether it’s herself or someone else.
(Jen Zoratti / Free Press)
These past weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Cornell 7, as I suspect most — actually, I’m going to be bold and say all — women are.
So, it felt good and right to be cocooned in powder-pink rooms celebrating both female rage and agency, the infrastructure of so much of Hole’s music, but surrounded by powerful images of women taking up space, taken by a woman whose work is also taking up physical space in the AGO.
To witness the kind of images that would be derided as vain and frivolous by men in Instagram comments be treated as what they are, which is art.
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