KIDS THESE DAYS

Jo-Anne Balcaen // Sarah Febbraro // Kerri Flannigan // Emmanuelle Léonard // Kyla Mallett // Helen Reed // Guillaume Simoneau

Central Gallery
April 8 to July 1, 2017

Curated by Zoë Chan

In contemporary North America, youth is commonly understood as the period after childhood when young people learn life skills and explore their identities in preparation for impending adulthood, within the formative, protective structures of family and school. This view of youth, however, is a relatively recent one and stands as a distinguishing feature of modernity in the Western world. Many pervasive ideas about youth come from psychology, anthropology and sociology—fields that came to the fore in the twentieth century. Within the social sciences, young people became a category to be studied, understood and conceptualized. In the wake of such theorizing, notions of youth have become persistently linked to wildness, authenticity, freedom and idealism—seductive qualities that have been cast as both dangerous and desirable.