From left to right: Kevin Kanashiro – untitled (3x)
Isabelle Hayeur – Ajour, Refuge
Jakub Dolejš – Moderne, In Control
My travel to Calgary to do an artist talk was supported by Canada Council for the Arts
As a participant in the inaugural event EXPOSURE: 2005 Festival Of Photography in Calgary and Banff, Alberta, Skew Gallery is pleased to present Perception, a photo exhibition curated by Emily Barnett, featuring the work of Jakub Dolejs, Isabelle Hayeur and Kevin Kanashiro. Perception features large scale photographic works, which engage the viewer, by stimulating unconventional views and spatial relationships with photography. Using various photographic techniques each artist explores notions of physical space and our relationship to it, while prompting our own awareness of how we perceive a physical environment. Jakub Dolejs: A 1998 MFA graduate from the Academy of Art & Architecture in Prague. The now Toronto based Dolejs, creates massive photographs, which immediately insist upon the viewer's active participation in decoding the peculiar staged spaces in his work. Dolejs is considered to be one of the most exciting young photographers in Canada, and has been curated into many significant exhibitions across Central Canada, in the United States and Europe. Perceptions marks his Western Canada debut. “We can read photographs, we can distinguish a holiday snapshot from an advertising pitch, and we can easily decipher most Photoshop tricks- we are in control of images. In my photography I suspend this belief for a brief moment before the eye discovers it's been fooled by a simple trick of staging the photograph in front of a painted backdrop. All of a sudden the existence of a real space beyond the trompe l'oeil fiction of the photographed painting becomes critical. It's this space between the narrative of the painting and it's anonymous surroundings where my images acquire their meanings. We are forced to deliberately accept the fiction.”
Isabelle Hayeur: Based in Montreal, Hayeur use the “transparency” of photography and the fact that it appears to be a direct representation of reality to fabricate spaces that are suspended between document and fiction. “My work over the past few years has focused on issues related to landscape design and architecture. I have been investigating the ways in which we invest in and occupy space, trying to gain a deeper understanding of landscape states in order to comprehend our societies' relationships to their environments. Landscape representations are attitudes of awareness; our interpretations of them and their spatial compositions bring us new visions of the world and ourselves. Doctoring my images, I compose vast panoramas that merge different sites into a single space. These landscapes appear to be familiar, but are constructed from many different images. These possible worlds show us how easy it is for us to now manipulate and play with the world's realities.”
Kevin Kanashiro: Calgary's own Kanashiro, creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth in his images, using lenticular photographic process. Simply explained, each print is taken with a three-lens camera that uses 3 negatives to produce a print. The image appears as three exposures slightly out of register. A lenticular lens is placed over the print enabling the 3-D effect by visually binding the images. “These particular pieces refer to an image of past reflection- glimpses of the peripheral in everyday travel. Specifically, the view looking into mirrors we see in our daily routine in our homes, in our daily routine travels (malls, store windows etc.) These are broken up by the interaction of other personal spaces. How these break up our perception of the immediate environment and three dimensional space are what interest me.”
SKEW GallerySuite 101 |
