more on the intimate and reflective moment of the sitter. We are placed in the construction of gesture, place, and light to contemplate a manufactured space that reflects the act of an individual, who is both looking inward at her station, and outward at the opportunities beyond the window. These choices to construct images are also important in the work of Sarah Ann Johnson, and Osheen Harruthoonyan. In her Wonderlust series, Johnson finds the photograph at a loss to convey the essence of the experience of intimacy. In the work Puzzle Pieces Johnson fragments and re-constructs the surface of the image to get closer to the sensations we have when we are intimate with one another. It is in these manipulations that the photograph comes to life as an image we can feel and trust. Osheen Harruthoonyan’s black and white, silver gelatin prints, from the series Saw the Splendor, are also rooted in surface manipulation but at the level of the negative. Harruthoonyan reworks his 4 X 5 inch negatives before he prints them. It is a process that lies in the alchemy of the wet darkroom. Here he transforms the film to create images that fluctuate between the cosmic and the microscopic. These images hover between two worlds, one we recognize and one we think we recognize. This shift of perception is at the heart of his love for creating images that masquerade as documents of the real and connect to his interest in memory, history, identity, and time. For Brea Souders’, a simple act of cutting up her negatives in an attempt to dispose of them resulted in the discovery that spoke to her about the demise of film and the parallels to memory. Film fragments she was trying to place in the trash became stuck to an acetate sheet and refused to let go. She saw it as “a metaphor for film itself trying to hold on, literally.” Her arrangements are formal figure/ground compositions where the fragments, often-recognizable pieces of the world, are shapes that float above the picture plane disconnected from time and place. On a poetic level they seem to act like fragments of memory, some of which fade away while others cling and persist. In Zach Nader’s work, we see a direct connection to the uncertainty around digital photography that has developed in the image-saturated and mediated world we inhabit. His interest lies in finding a place for photography in an overly mediated world. Works in the series Counterweight began as family snapshots, which were then altered digitally to remove all traces of people. He intentionally uses the content aware fill tool to eliminate all the people from the photograph, but pushes the digital technology beyond its intended design. As a result, unexpected shifts in the patterns and colours of the photograph appear. These deliberate disturbances in the picture’s plane and the video’s narrative sequences speak directly to the nature of ‘digital intervention’ and how ‘images are both created and consumed.’ Robert Canali’s sculptural pieces speak to the history of photography and how our perception of the traditional darkroom has changed. The enlarger presented in the exhibition has been carefully refurbished as “one would restore a classic car.” Its placement on a marble base changes its purpose from a functional object to one of aesthetic beauty. The device used in the act of creating an aesthetic object has itself become the object of beauty. In the plexiglass vitrines, there are housed black plastic sleeves that were traditionally used to protect light sensitive material from exposure to light. In each vitrine one bag is presented, taped shut and containing a piece of exposed paper, sealed from the light and sealed from the viewer. We can only imagine what image or potential image might be revealed were it to be processed in the appropriate chemicals. Canali gives us a conceptual look at the performance and tools that are part of the workings of the darkroom. He also reminds us of the beauty and mystery inherent to photography in the pre-digital era. The eight artists in the exhibition all bring to their practice a deeper understanding of the complexities and diversity found in the photographic arts today. Their practices, very different in approach, are connected by a desire to weave an element of humanity into the photographic process. Peggy Taylor Reid
Photography in the time of Digital Disenchantment
PEEL ART GALLERY, MUSEUM AND ARCHIVES 9 Wellington St. E., Brampton, ON L6W 1Y1 905-791-4055 • pama.peelregion.ca
Photography
in the Time of Digital Disenchantment May 4 – July 6, 2014 Opening Reception:
Sunday May 4, 2014, 2-4 pm.
From the late 20th century to today, the explosion of digital photography and its use in both social and mass media have changed the nature of taking and viewing photographs. With the saturation of images on both a commercial and individual level, there was in the beginning, a sense of freedom and discovery. However, as technology progressed the deluge of images became overwhelming. Skepticism crept in and questions about the photograph’s role in a digital world were debated. Two main debates centered around the veracity of the images being viewed and the loss of the real when “the decisive moment” of the shutter’s release came into doubt. Today the question of authorship is no longer in the realm of object/subject but more on the circumstances and intentions of the photographer. This show includes eight photographers whose work ranges across a timeline of historical photographic practices but with a link to the present understanding of photography in a time when we have started to gain some perspective on the digital revolution. The artists in this exhibition use both analogue and digital photography to convey multiple concepts associated with time and space, nature and culture, subject-object relations, memory and identity. Their images are determined by both the technologies they employ and the photographic choices they make. In the wake of recent popularization of the self-portrait on social media sites, it is refreshing to view the work of Elizabeth Siegfried. Her series “look” stems from her 25- year focus on self-portraiture. Her interest in self-portraiture grew out wanting to capture something about herself she did not know or see in the mirror. Her choice to use black and white is most certainly linked to her years of working in Platinum printing. Although this new work is digitally printed it has the feeling and quality of her earlier platinum prints. As selfportraiture requires the artist to be both photographer and sitter there enters into the equation the element of performance. Siegfried is aware of the performance element and in “look” we see it in the framing of the image. It is not always conventional and sections of her face may be outside the frame, sometimes at awkward angles. Her gaze towards or away from the camera acts as a film still and this draws us into the story. In “look” the story is about loss and acceptance. In much of Siegfried’s work, we see this connection to the passage of time and place whether it is physical or psychological one. Place is an important part of Dianne Bos’ work. She uses pinhole photography to capture her ethereal images of interiors. The pinhole camera is, at its roots, the most basic of photographic tools. It is a light tight box with a pinhole at one end and light sensitive material placed opposite. The exposures for pinhole photographs are typically quite long, from 5 to 15 minutes. The beauty of these long exposures is that the light leaves behind a faint trace of any movement and people become ghostly trails or completely disappear. Bos writes “By using pinhole cameras and long exposure times I record, not an instant, but rather the passage of time at the site. This recognizes the importance I have assigned to time, memory and capturing the essence of place.”She also refers to these interiors as being a “malleable substance of darkness and light.” The light in her photos bathes the interiors in a way that enhances their beauty and transports us as if into a dream. Virgina Mak’s use of filtered light and soft focus also creates an image that feels dreamlike but is rooted in the elusive nature of memory. In Tai Nan Street Mak creates scenes that are steeped in ambiguity. There are visual hints, here and there, where she chooses to allow the viewer a clear glimpse of the scene but for the most part, the details are hidden from us. We become unsure what we are looking at. The recognizable and ambiguous sections intersect like two memories colliding. Mak’s use of printing techniques in Tai Nan Street harken back to the early history of shadow prints. In the darkroom, she prints the negative through rice paper thus obscuring some of the images in a hazy softness. Her choice to place the rice paper between the negative and the prints is reminiscent of how memories themselves are interleaved between time and place. In Room of One’s Own, Mak photographs people immersed in light from the window. It is the quality of light and the soft focus that draw us to the figures in the photos. They are ghostly shadows whose gender is readily discernable. Mak deliberately constructs images that transcend objectivity, leading us to focus
Brea Souders
Dianne Bos
Elizabeth Siegfried
Osheen Harruthoonyan
Robert Canali
Sarah Ann Johnson
Virginia Mak
Zach Nader
Brea Souders is an artist based in New York City. She has held solo exhibitions at Daniel Cooney Fine Art and Abrons Arts Center in NYC, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Hyères International Festival of Photography and Fashion, France, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York and M+B Gallery, Los Angeles. Features and reviews of her work have appeared in ARTnews, The New Yorker, Photograph Magazine, L’Officiel Art and New York Magazine. Her work has been supported by the Millay Colony of the Arts, the Camera Club of New York, CAMAC Art Centre / Fondation Ténot, and Women in Photography / LTI-Lightside.
Dianne Bos was born in Hamilton, Ontario, received her B.F.A. from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and currently divides her time between the foothills of the Rockies and the Pyrenees.
Elizabeth Siegfried, born in Baltimore Maryland, has lived and worked in Canada for over twenty-five years. Siegfried studied English at university, but upon graduation she followed her passion for photography and participated in a six-month residency program at The Maine Photographic Workshops (MPW) in Rockport, Maine. Over the following twenty years, Siegfried continued her studies with celebrated artists around the world, in addition to teaching her own workshops in Toronto.
Osheen Harruthoonyan is an experimental photographer working exclusively in a traditional wet darkroom, printing on fiber based gelatin silver paper. Based in Montreal, Quebec and drawing upon his rich experiences growing up in diverse cities like Theran, Iran and Athens, Greece he employs a multi-faceted approach towards his artistic practice; investigating memory, history, identity and time. Osheen’s work has been featured on Bravo! Arts Channel, Space Channel’s InnerSPACE, and numerous national and international publications. His exhibitions are consistently noted as top shows not to miss.
Robert Canali (b. 1988) received his BFA from York University, Toronto. His practice is marked by process-driven techniques that explore reality and repurpose it as artistic gestures by means of photography, sculpture, and installation. Robert has shown internationally in Melbourne, Brussels, Paris, New York, and Toronto, with forthcoming shows in Brussels, Toronto, and New York. He has been the recipient of a Regional Arts Award from the Brampton Council of Fine Arts and the Photography Honorarium Award from York University. His work has been featured on the cover of BlackFlash Magazine and included in Conveyor Arts and Mossless Magazine. He has an artist book featured in the Visible Spectrum book series, published by Conveyor Arts, to be launched at the forthcoming New York Art Book Fair. Canali currently lives and works in Toronto. His work is represented by Super Dakota in Brussels.
Born in Winnipeg in 1976, Sarah Anne Johnson received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 2002, and went on to complete her MFA at The Yale School of Art in 2004. Johnson’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally in the Canada, USA, France and Australia. In 2009 Sarah was invited to participate by The Farm Foundation in a new program where a group of artists, activists and scientists traveled to the Arctic Circle for 21 days and made work about the experience.
Known for its soft focus and minimized light values, Virginia Mak’s work disrupts the boundary between painting and photography. Themes of longing, the sense of not belonging, and the individual’s connection to the inner self recur in her work.
Zach Nader is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily with video and photography. Nader alters existing imagery through the misuse of common editing software tools. His inquiry addresses the ways in which elements of anticipation and loss continue to live and transform through image creation and consumption. Since his arrival in New York in the summer of 2011, Nader’s works have exhibited nationally and internationally, including most recently in Israel and Australia. Zach Nader was born in Dallas, Texas and received his Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Texas Tech University in 2011. He is represented by Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Her photographs have been exhibited internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions since 1981, including The McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton; the Confederation Centre Gallery, Charlottetown; Reading Room, Cambridge; as well as in Italy, France, Spain and Japan in 2011 and 2012. Recent public art commissions include a large light box installation at Toronto’s VU condominiums entitled ‘Palimpsest’ and the banner design for the city of Calgary’s bridges. Many of Bos’s recent exhibitions feature handmade cameras, walk-in light installations, and sound pieces. These tools and devices formulate and extend her investigations of journeying, time, and the science of light. Dianne Bos is represented by: Edward Day Gallery, Toronto; Jennifer Kostuik Gallery, Vancouver; NewZones, Calgary; Davis/Waldron Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia; Beaux-arts des Amériques, Montreal.
Known for her work in portraiture of self and others, meditative landscapes and photographic narrative, Siegfried has exhibited her images in Canada, the US, Italy, Germany, Japan and Mexico. In recent years, she has expanded her mode of presentation of platinum prints to include archival digital prints and wet plate collodion. Siegfried’s work is represented in public and private collections around the world. Siegfried’s photographs have been reproduced and discussed in such publications as SHOTS magazine, Schwarzweiss, La Fotografia Actual, Camera Arts, Photo Life Magazine, ARTNews, Photo Educator Magazine and The Women’s Daybook. In 2008, she was one of the featured photographers on Behind The Camera, a television production aired on Bravo! and Discovery HD.
She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ‘The Grange Prize’, granted by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Aeroplan, and a ‘ Major Grant’ from the Manitoba Arts Council. She was a finalist for the 2011 Sobey Art Award. She is included in several distinguished collections including The Guggenheim Museum in New York, and The National Gallery of Canada. Johnson is represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto.
Born in Hong Kong, she now makes her home in Toronto. After graduating with a Philosophy degree from the University of Calgary, she went on to study Photography at the Ontario College of Art. Mak has exhibited her photographic works internationally and is a recipient of many project grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Recent work includes: Laundromat, Letter to My Mother, Side Street, Oh Ominous Sunshine, Hidden Nature, Light thronged, Tai Nan Street, Of Ones’s Own, Comfort of Objects and Character Reference. Mak is represented by Bau-Xi Photo in Toronto and Vancouver and by Newzones in Calgary.