“The Great Depression,” organized by independent curator Christina Vassallo, brings together work by two close friends, painter Brad Phillips and photographer Rasool Sarangi , who grew up together in Pickering, a suburb of Toronto, “two blocks apart, and one mile from a nuclear power plant,” as Phillips describes it.

“The Great Depression” has as its jumping off point a show mounted at Wallspace Gallery in New York in the summer of 2005, in which gallery artist Brad Phillips was asked to select one art work that had been particularly meaningful and influential to him; for one week, that work would be displayed, along with a text by Phillips, describing his interaction with the work. Phillips chose one of Sarangi's photographs of a forest near their childhood neighborhood, an area Phillips described as "not a forest for relaxing, but for being beaten in, chased through - a place to hide or cry or contemplate terrible things." Elaborating on the convergences and divergences in their takes on personal narrative, cultural artifacts and our natural surrounds, curator Christina Vassallo has selected works by each artist that shed light on their individual artistic processes, as well as their rich aesthetic kinship.

Brad Phillips is known for paintings that bring a sense of darkly autobiographical, highly narrative significance to objects and images from our shared cultural landscape as well as from the artist’s personal realm. Images of novels and pictures frames, commercial lettering and kitchen knives, and his wife coming out of the shower are compelling, familiar, and psychological – and they form a rather noir invitation into the realm of the artist’s complex consciousness. Phillips’ work has been recently seen at Liste 07 in Basel, Switzerland, at Wallspace Gallery in New York, and at CSA Space in Vancouver, BC.

Rasool Sarangi makes photographs of scenes encountered in his own life, including, in his words, “pictures in my home, my mother's house where I grew up, the conservation area where I learned to smoke drugs and fear nazi skinheads. I don't want to make impersonal pictures…. I feel that examining one's own life is the same as examining the society and the culture in which it exists.” Sarangi’s work has recently been seen at CSA Space in Vancouver, BC, and at The Drake Hotel in Toronto, ON, where he was artist in residence in spring 2006.