Cover Image: Kevin Schmidt and Holly Ward
Art, Research, Play: The Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Project
BOOK LAUNCH
Saturday, June 25, 2022
8:00 am to 1:00 pm
Kamloops Farmers’ Market
200 St. Paul Street, downtown Kamloops
During summer solstice 2015 in Dawson City, Yukon, the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival brought together an international group of artists and researchers interested in cameras obscura, optical phenomena, the meeting of art and science, culture, wilderness, learning and play. The project was conceived by Kamloops-based artist and visual arts professor Donald Lawrence and, with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the group carried out extensive research during 2014 and 2015. With this exceptional support, and using the long days to maximum effect, the festival consisted of public installations in Dawson City, a Yukon Arts Centre (Whitehorse) exhibition, workshops, performances, tours, and public talks.
This publication chronicles the activities of the artists and researchers including:
Dianne Bos, Lea Bucknell, Ernie Kroeger, Kevin Schmidt, Holly Ward, Carsten Wirth, Andrew Wright.
With texts by noted dutch thinker Petran Kockelkoren, curator Josephine Mills, and Donald Lawrence.
Edited by Josephine Mills and Donald Lawrence.
KARSH CONTINUUM 2022 — Curated by ANDREW WRIGHT MAR 3 to APR 1, 2022
2022 Karsh Continuum honours the artistic legacy of Yousuf and Malak Karsh while continuing an intergenerational chain of mentorship that fosters photo/lens-based innovation. 2019 Karsh Award laureate Andrew Wright selected emerging local artists Stéphane Alexis, Shelby Lisk and Neeko Paluzzi for this exhibition and mentorship opportunity: “All three artists engage with photography in an expanded sense. Recognizing both the utility and the limitations of photography’s established traditions and conceits, they continue to make poignant works where photography is an important yet constituent part of their significance.”
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“I was looking at the series that I shot, and I began to recognize a lot of references from my own life. I recognized that these chicken feet seemed to be mimicking relationships that we have… they are intersecting with each other in this world of their own… The point of the project is to have a conversation, for us to reflect on our lives. And this conversation is about the relationships that we have, different aspects of them. I’m using the term “relationships” very broadly. At the end of the day, it’s about how we connect with the world… I would like people to be curious, to look at these images and to think again about what they are seeing and what it can mean. Ideally, they would say: “Chicken feet? I didn’t realize that they could look like that,” or “I had no idea they look so similar to human hands.' So, in this context, they might have to rethink their assumptions about what they thought they already knew.”
Stéphane Alexis is a Caribbean-Canadian artist based in Ottawa. His work stems from his personal experiences, along with the demographic, and sub-demographic groups to which he belongs. His focus is both on conceptual design and aesthetic quality. He brings attention, and transparency to different people and communities that are tucked away due to the hardships they face. These qualities are used to bridge insight on issues and circumstances facing these communities, both locally and globally, through the subject matter. Alexis has won awards and grants for his book design and thought-provoking content. He has exhibited in solo and group shows across Ontario and has numerous national publications.
Image: Poultry no. 9, 2021, C-print, 76 x 76 cm, courtesy of the artist -
“My project combines family photos and images that I’ve taken in my community – of the places where my family lived, the places that were important to them – and beadwork resembling the style of beaded frames made by Haudenosaunee women, especially in the early 1900s. In each frame I’m working with a different phrase in Mohawk and exploring their meanings and their connections to the culture. There are words that first-language speakers know that could be lost if they’re not passed down or recorded… I feel like this project is more about offering ‘the dominant culture’ another way to think. It’s actually offering everyone a gift. That there are other ways to do things. And these ways come from the language of this place, and the land here. These can be ways for all of us.”
Shelby Lisk is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and photographer from Kenhtè:ke (Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory) whose art practice explores her connection to and place in the world as a Kanyen’kehá:ka woman. Lisk completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (with a minor in Gender Studies) at the University of Ottawa (2015). She also has a diploma in Photojournalism from Loyalist College (2019) and a certificate in Mohawk Language and Culture through Queen's University and Tsi Tyónnheht Onkwawén:na (2020). Lisk currently works full-time as a multimedia journalist covering Indigenous current affairs in Ontario. Shelby Lisk gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council.Image: tó na’tesohseriyà:kon (detail), 2021, beads, felt, ribbon and paper, 28 x 22 cm, courtesy of the artist
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“My piece is a visualization of an infamous debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, who was a philosopher in the early 20th century. Their debate took place in Paris in 1922 exactly 100 years ago. They debated the concept of “time” from the scientific perspective (Einstein) versus the philosophical perspective (Bergson). What people see is a video of two faces on top of each other, discussing together, and debating their opposing views concerning the nature of time… The video is reacting to itself, and every time you watch it will be slightly different—and so what I hope is that if someone were to see it once they might have an idea what time is, how it might be described, but when they come back and see it again, the idea that they initially had could be changed as a result of what they’ve newly seen.”
Neeko Paluzzi is a queer Canadian artist and educator whose practice focuses on intertextual, photo-based installations. His images blend the possibilities of traditional, analogue darkroom processes with contemporary photographic techniques, such as 3D scanning and printing. He was the winner of the 2018 Project X, Photography Award from the Ottawa Arts Council, and his work appeared in a featured exhibition at the Scotiabank CONTACT Festival in 2019. Paluzzi is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Ottawa while maintaining a teaching position at the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute.
Image: On the nature of time, 2021, video still, 10 minutes, courtesy of the artist
Helloland!
On until September 2021
Notes from Curators Melony Ward & Darryn Doull:
ANDREW WRIGHT
SURVEY AND SURVEIL
Helloland! Art, War and the Wireless Imagination. These notes bring together fragments of curatorial research, historical context and information about featured artists and their work. Each artist will be ‘paired’ with museological objects, archival images and/or historical documents that share a common theme.
ANDREW WRIGHT talks about his practice and about his 2007 series Standing Waves, showing now at MUSEUM LONDON as a part of RESOLUTION: A Century of Photographic Art
Works seen in the video:
Tree Corrections • Disused Twinned 35mm Cameras • Disused Portrait Camera Considers Wedgwood Vase • Standing Waves • Wrapped Trees •
(In the video I say that the Standing Waves are from 2005 — they’re not. 2007, actually :)
HELLOLAND!
Curated by Darryn Doull and Melony Ward
lOpens January 23rd @ The ROOMS, NFLD
Jackson 2bears + Janet Rogers, Amanda Dawn Christie, Alan Collier, Brian Groombridge, Maureen Gruben, Marc Losier, Qavavau Manumie, Margo Pfeiff, Christopher Pratt, Reginald Shepherd, Charles Stankievech, Michael Waterman and Andrew Wright
There are few better places to tell a story about wireless communications and radio infrastructure than St. John’s, NL. Famously the site of Marconi’s first trans-Atlantic wireless communication on December 12, 1901, radio has long found a home here. Indeed, the story of radio in this place is one of community, survival, education, religion and confederation. It is a story that is indivisible from the social, political, economic and military developments of a small independent country, which became the tenth province in Canada.
read more…
Image: Charles Stankievech, The DEW Project (installation view), Confluence of Klondike + Yukon Rivers, Yukon Territory, Canada. 64o03’ N, 139o27’ W, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Resolution:
A Century of Photographic Art
MUSEUM LONDON until Jan 17 2021
Andrew Wright, Ed Burtynsky, Shelley Niro, Larry Towell, Sandra Semchuk, and 23 more
Recent Press about FILMTRACK 4 A SOUND | SUITE KURELEK DE FIALA and APEX: INTERLOPER
Andrew Wright’s “Filmscape for a Soundtrack”
CBC Radio One, aired Jan. 21, 2020 (11:30mins)
Art within art: 2019 Karsh Award winner Andrew Wright offers an homage of sorts
Artsfile.ca, Jan. 23rd, 2020
In Andrew Wright’s world, the beauty’s never skin-deep
CBC News - Posted Jan. 19, 2020
Interview for CBC’s All In A Day January 21, 2020:
Andrew Wright’s FILMTRACK 4 A SOUND (2010-2020)
“FILMTRACK 4 A SOUND: SUITE KURELEK DE FIALA (2010-2020)” is inspired by a pristine, unopened box set of records from the 1980s that Wright found in 2009. A perfectly preserved artefact of a more idealistic time, Canadian Anthology (CBC 1987) is carefully unboxed, played, recorded a single time, and then resealed. Within the anthology is the Kurelek Suite (1982), by composer George Fiala (1922-2017), an orchestral work in which each of the five movements is a response to a particular painting by William Kurelek. Instead of generating music to accompany a film, Wright has filmed passages to accompany the music — a ‘filmtrack’ of sweeping views of arctic landscapes… or so it would seem.
“3 unending films about landscape based on music based on paintings about Canada…sorta”
ANDREW WRIGHT wins the 2019 KARSH AWARD
The City of Ottawa is pleased to announce that artist Andrew Wright is the winner of the 2019 Karsh Award.
The peer assessment committee selected Mr. Wright from an impressive list of nominated artists. The jury was comprised of the associate curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, Lori Pauli, past Karsh Award laureate Michael Schreier, and Franco-Ontarian photographer Geneviève Thauvette.
Mr. Wright has used photography in traditional and decidedly non-traditional ways for more than 25 years. He was nominated for the Karsh Award twice, in 2010 and 2012, and was nominated six times for the Sobey Art Award, for which he was a semi-finalist in 2007. In 2011, he won the Gattuso Prize at the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto.
City Council established the Karsh Award in 2003 to honour the enduring legacy of late photographers Yousuf and Malak Karsh.
• The 2019 Karsh Award
• City of Ottawa Press Release
• Artsfile.ca
• leDroit
• Twitter
Photography & The Art of Trespassing
Wright’s photography can confound, turn askew, upset — or in the case of Data Trespass “antagonize”—..
National Gallery of Canada acquires
Data Trespass
July 11, 2018
Data Trespass: Illegal Photographs is a conceptual suite of panoramic images that antagonize a recent Wyoming statute that makes outdoor photography an illegal and indictable form of data collection. This work was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada in July of 2018 and now resides in their collection.
Also acquired was a video work titled Data Trespass: Wyoming v. Wright that derives its footage from a mock trial where Wright was prosecuted for his apparent contravention of the Wyoming ‘no photography’ law.
More info here
Curator Michelle Gewurtz talks OAG Expansion
Exposed: Alumnus Andrew Wright’s photography draws global acclaim
U of T Mississauga is like an object in the distance in a piece of Andrew Wright’s photo- graphic art; although it isn’t the focus of the work, it continues to make its presence felt.
Wright, an artist and chair of the visual arts program at the University of Ottawa, has exhibited with the likes of Michael Snow and Edward Burtynsky, and his works hang in the Canadian High Commission
in London, U.K. and aboard the Canadian warship HMCS Toronto.
Wright arrived at UTM in 1990 from Kingston, Ont. He earned a specialist BA
in art and art history in 1994, shuttling back and forth between UTM and Sheridan College for classes in the joint program. “It was pretty idyllic,” he says of UTM. “We used to wake up with deer on our lawn. It felt like we were just on the edge of farmers’ fields.”
Wright went on to earn his MFA at the University of Windsor, but returned to UTM and Sheridan brie y to teach in the program from which he had graduated. “I wasn’t sure how one makes a living as an artist and how to sustain a practice,” Wright says. “I started picking up teaching jobs here and there and did sessional teaching for about a decade. “It was just happenstance that I ended up teaching [at UTM]. I may be the only gradu- ate who has taught in the program, and it’s a personal point of pride.”
Wright was required to teach a photography course and it was then that he rst began to consider the possibilities o ered by photography as a medium. His early practice had focused on sculpture. “I came to photography through the back door,” Wright says. “I didn’t do it with any seriousness until I left graduate school. “When I came back to teach at Sheridan, I was given a photography class, and I had to learn pretty quickly.” Today, photographic art is his focus, although his work is “not about making pretty pictures. “The photography I do is about something other than the image presented,” Wright says. “I comment on the circumstances around their creation or assumptions we make about esthetic value;
I try to challenge assumptions.”
One of his ongoing passions is the camera obscura, a technique that is the ancestor to today’s camera. The term— which literally means dark chamber— involves a darkened room where light is admitted through a pinhole that casts the outside image on a dark wall in inverted fashion. Mirrors and lenses are often used to redirect the image.
Wright recently took his art to the Korean port of Ulsan, the world’s largest shipping port. Using a shipping container as a camera obscura, he created images of a tree hanging upside down from a crane. “The work is a bit of commentary on the commercial-industrial nature of the practice of photography,” he says. “The tree is upside down, so it’s right side up in the camera.
It’s a contemplation on the nature of photo- graphy in a very industrial context.”
As a practising artist, Wright has dozens of exhibitions under his belt, including four solo shows in the past two years and publication of a large catalogue of his work. The exhibitions coincided with the rst sabbatical of his career, a year that saw him work on projects in locations as far flung as Venice and the Yukon.
Although he has taught at the University of Ottawa since 2008, Wright hasn’t forgotten his UTM roots. He personally raises money each year for an alumni award given to a graduate of the Art and Art History program. “It’s about recognizing the program and trying to contribute back to everything the program gave me: a sense of possibility, a sense of opportunity and
a really good grounding in creative and critical thinking.” — Elaine Smith
DISUSED TWIN BROWNIE HAWKEYE CAMERAS; SELF-PORTRAIT; SUSPENDED/BOUND TREE ALL PHOTOS COURTESY ANDREW WRIGHT
ANDREW WRIGHT Visits uWindsor
Thursday, November 10, 2:30 pm
LeBel building, room 115
Free event
Andrew Wright’s artistic practice is at the intersection of traditional and conceptual forms of art-making. Wright's use of photography is decidedly non-conventional as it challenges lyricism and traditional pictorial aims and favours an exploratory, evocative approach that is "pre-occupied with ontologies of optical technologies and representational systems.”
Wright has exhibited both nationally and internationally. 2016 marked his first solo exhibition in the U.K. at London Gallery West of the University of Westminster. In August of 2014, Wright’s work was shown at the Xi’an Art Museum in central China. The exhibition traveled to Beijing's TODAY ART MUSEUM in January 2015.
In February of 2015, Wright’s works Eastern White Pines (2011) and Go Home Bay (2011) are installed permanently in the Robert Borden room of Canada House, Canada's High Commission in London.
Andrew Wright is an alumnus of the University of Windsor’s MFA program. www.andrewwright.ca.
Prof. Sigrun Torinus
The MIDNIGHT SUN CAMERA OBSCURA PROJECT
Reception: September 15, 4 – 6 pm
Artists: Dianne Bos, Lea Bucknell, Ernie Kroeger, Donald Lawrence, Kevin Schmidt, Holly Ward, Carsten Wirth, Andrew Wright
Curated by Josephine Mills
The Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival brought together an international group of artists and other researchers interested in cameras obscura and related optical phenomenon as a meeting place of art and science, cultural and wilderness settings, learning and play. The project was conceived by Kamloops-based artist and visual art professor Donald Lawrence and was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The group of artists, scholars, and art students came together for summer solstice, 2015, in Dawson City, Yukon where they used the exceptionally long days and stunning landscape to produce a variety of art works.
As is clear in the range of work proposed for this exhibition, the camera obscura holds a fascination with contemporary artists and audiences. Camera obscura simply means ‘dark room’ in Latin and was a term coined to describe devices devised to aid perception, but can include any darkened space into which light enters through a small opening (sometimes aided by a lens and a mirror). Mills attended the festival in the Yukon and has curated an exhibition out of the project for the U of L Art Gallery. This new phase of the project will connect the work with a wider public and, in addition to the exhibition, the U of L Art Gallery is working on a national tour and a major publication. The exhibition includes several of the cameras obscura – the actual objects for viewing and recording surrounding imagery; images projected by these devices; documentation of the event; and new work produced by the artists in response to the initial research and festival.
The Ottawa Art Gallery is pleased to announce the publication of:
Andrew Wright: Pretty Lofty and Heavy All At Once
THURSDAY, MAY 26, 2016, 5 — 8 PM
HOUSE OF TARG (It's a spot like no other, featuring the best in live music, pinball, old school arcade games and a delicious menu of handmade perogies) www.houseoftarg.com
1077 Bank St. Ottawa, Ontario K1S 3W9
(right across from the Mayfair Theatre).
BUY IT EARLY AND GET IT FREE!! Click Here
Conceived as an artist's book, Andrew Wright's multivariate photographic, sculptural and video work is showcased in this 144-page bilingual colour catalogue. Designed by Simon Guibord, the catalogue features essays by photographic scholar Carol Payne, and photo-theorist Randy Innes, with contributions by Ola Wlusek and Michelle Gewurtz.
Pretty Lofty and Heavy All At Once captures four substantive exhibitions held in the last three years featuring works dating between 2001 and 2015. Multimedia works presented in this catalogue appeared in different configurations in Penumbra, a mid-career survey and a primary exhibition of the 2013 CONTACT Photography Festival at The Art Museum University of Toronto, Selected Diptychs & Multiples at the Thames Art Gallery (2014), Tableaux photographiques non-titrés at Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montréal (2015) and Pretty Lofty & Heavy All at Once, Ottawa Art Gallery OAG/GAO (2015).
Wright's contributions to this publication are multiple: his photographs are reproduced as full-colour plates that cleverly punctuate texts by Payne, Innes, and Wlusek. As pieces that attend to the history of the medium itself, Wright's images reflect and refract off of the silvered pages interspersed throughout the book.
Carol Payne considers the historical and contemporary antecedents of Wright’s practice. She writes: “Wright has been preoccupied with questioning the inherited discourses of photography by exploring the visual opportunities that photographic technologies make possible.” In Wright's work, the “engagement with the intellectual play of conceptualism coexists with an aesthetic and technical acuity.” Payne concludes: “Wright's art practice is historically aware while at the same time persistently contemporary.”
Andrew Wright, Two views of Disused Twin Brownie Hawkeye Cameras, 2015, silvered objects, custom plinth
Photo theorist Randy Innes’ essay “Photography En Exterus: Andrew Wright and the Expansions of Photography”, draws on philosophical and theoretical models of the photographic that encourage a consideration of photography that does not privilege the activities of depiction and posits Wright’s project as an expression of the mise-en-abyme: “In Wright’s Disused Portrait Camera Considers Wedgwood Vase, the silvery conditions for the possibility of photography have been displaced. Where they were once part of a mirroring function that informs the photographic image itself, the reflective surfaces direct our attention beyond the image-function of photography, and towards its expansions in historical time and material space…Wright's work is located within key contemporary discourses on the status of photography, art, and the image. “
As an artist's book, this publication represents the Ottawa Art Gallery’s ongoing commitment to partnerships and programming that provides a historical and current context of contemporary art practices in concert with the OAG’s $34-million expansion project, due to be completed in 2017.
Launched in a limited edition in London, UK, in conjunction with the exhibition Data Trespass at London Gallery West, University of Westminster, the publication is available exclusively through the Ottawa Art Gallery.
Andrew Wright has exhibited at venues across Canada and abroad in solo exhibitions including: Presentation House, Vancouver; London Gallery West, UK; Prefix ICA, Toronto; University of California, Berkeley; Oakville Galleries. In 2015, his work was included in the second issue of the Milan-based journal, Mould, curated by Joan Foncuberta. Wright's work was also shown alongside works by Michael Snow, Iain Baxter&, and Ed Burtynsky at the Xi’an Art Museum in central China and Beijing's TODAY ART MUSEUM. In 2011, Wright won the inaugural Gattuso Prize at Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto and in 2007, he was named a semi-finalist for the Sobey Art Award.
Wright’s 2016 exhibition at London Gallery West included a new 130-foot outdoor photographic commission tilted SURGE, and it will remain on view each evening after dark until January 2017.
Carol Payne is Associate Professor of Art History and research associate in the Public History program at Carleton University. She is the author of The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division and the Image of Canadian Nationhood, 1941-1971. (McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2013) and coeditor with Andrea Kunard of The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).
Randy Innes holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. He held the History of Photography research fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada, and he has published research and exhibition essays on historical and contemporary photography, museum theory and practice, and contemporary painting, among other topics. He has taught at Trent University, Carleton University, and the University of Ottawa.
Ola Wlusek is an independent curator. She obtained an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London, (London, UK), and she studied anthropology and art history at McMaster University (Hamilton, ON). She has worked in educational and curatorial departments at public art institutions in Canada and abroad for the past ten years.
Michelle Gewurtz is the Interim Senior Curator at the Ottawa Art Gallery. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Leeds, with a specialty in Feminist Theory, History and Criticism in the Visual Arts. Her curatorial projects explore the convergence of gender politics and creative identity, and her research interests extend to both historical and contemporary art practices. Michelle has also taught undergraduate courses in Art History and Gender Studies at the University of Waterloo and OCAD University.
In English and French.
Available exclusively through the Ottawa Art Gallery,
info@ottawaartgallery.ca
From North America: 1 (613) 233-8699
From Europe/UK: 001-613-233-8699
Sneak peek of Pretty Lofty & Heavy All At Once catalog--LAUNCHING MAY 26th, 2016!
With Essays by Carol Payne and Randy Innes, Ola Wlusek. Design by Simon Guibord. Publication Coordination Michelle Gewurtz
Download Press Release here (PDF)
Link to London Gallery West, University of Westminster
February 2016
ANDREW WRIGHT: DATA TRESPASS
11 MARCH 2016 – 10 APRIL 2016
London Gallery West is delighted to present works of acclaimed Canadian artist Andrew Wright. The artist’s international solo exhibition features a new London Gallery West commission; a large site-specific photographic installation that adorns the 24 windows of the glazed façade of the entrance to The Forum. This new work, titled Surge, was photographed in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, the most geo-thermically active location on the planet. Consisting of never–before–seen images of tumultuous geysers shot at night with high-powered flash, it presents unquantifiable detail while at the same time inviting a reconsideration of photography’s veracity. These images are a continuation and expansion of Wright’s Illuminated Landscapes series begun in 2001, and are reminiscent of his well-known Water’s Edge (2005), shot at the base of Niagara Falls. Using techniques drawn from the indoor photographic studio and applied to landscape, an overt artificiality characterizes large images that contain both complexities essentially impossible to depict or describe, even photographically, and areas of utter void and empty blackness.
Other works include Data Trespass: Illegal Photographs, a conceptual suite of panoramic images that antagonize a recent Wyoming statute that makes outdoor photography an illegal and indictable form of data collection. Accompanying this photographic works is a new video, also titled Data Trespass, whose footage derives from a mock trial where Wright was prosecuted for his apparent contravention of the Wyoming ‘no photography’ law.
Dawson Looking Glass troubles conventions of landscape and street photography by picturing a photo-performance with a large mirror in the Yukon during ‘midnight sun’, the longest day of the year. Also featured is Disused Twin Brownie Hawkeye Cameras, an example of Wright’s ongoing use of twinning, mirroring and doubling as part of a complex play on perception. Beijing Odyssey is a contemplative video work shot from a Beijing hotel room that offers a drastically occluded view of a massive LED advertising billboard, exploring the zones of transfer and exchange between the marvels of the machine age and the visual culture of modernity.
Wright’s use of photography is decidedly non-conventional as it challenges lyricism and traditional pictorial aims and favours an exploratory, evocative approach that probes optical and representational technologies, their cultures, their histories, conventions and conceits. Wright’s photographic, sculptural, and video practice critiques the photographic activities of depiction and representation. His provocative use of photographic materials and photo-like procedures suggest alternative ways of both considering and interpreting image and object. For Wright, meaning is often derived from conditions or circumstances outside of or in direct opposition to information presented as depiction.
Midgnight Sun Camera Obscura
January 16 to March 19, 2016
kamloops art gallery
101-465 Victoria St.
Kamloops, BC, canada
http://kag.bc.ca/exhibitions/index.htm
Dianne Bos, Lea Bucknell, Ernie Kroeger, Donald Lawrence, Kevin Schmidt & Holly Ward, Carsten Wirth, Andrew Wright, Mike Yuhasz
Kevin Schmidt and Holly Ward, Eye of the Beholder, 2015, Dibond, vinyl, lens, Plexiglas, wood, Velcro, hardware
VIZ. (videre licit) @ Patrick Mikhail, Montréal until October 3rd, 2015
Viz., 2015, Silver on wood and high density laminate, dimensions variable (each panel approx. 60 x 60 cm).
Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival, Dawson City, Yukon. June17 -21 2015
Migrating across the domains of art, science, and popular entertainment cameras obscura (darkened spaces in which images of the outside world appeared through seemingly magical means) held a prominent place in the visual culture of previous centuries and hold a continued fascination for artists today. Summer Solstice 2015 will see this festival of artists' cameras obscura and related projects in Dawson City, Yukon - home of the twenty-four hour "midnight sun." Projects around town will be complemented by an exhibition in Dawson City's ODD Gallery, Canada's northernmost contemporary art gallery, and the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse. Festival events will include tours of the artists' projects, workshops, and public presentations. Hosted by the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, the Festival is an event of The Camera Obscura Project, an international group of artists, scholars, students, and community partners that is based at Thompson Rivers University.
Artists and scholars participating in the Festival include: Dianne Bos (Canada/France), Lea Bucknell (Canada), Sven Dupré (Germany), Bob Jickling (Canada), Petran Kockelkoren (Holland), Ernie Kroeger (Canada), Donald Lawrence (Canada), Kevin Schmidt (Canada/Germany), Doug Smarch (Canada), Holly Ward (Canada/Germany), Carsten Wirth (Germany), Andrew Wright (Canada), Mike Yuhasz (Canada). The Festival will also involve visual arts students and alumni from Thompson Rivers University, the Yukon School of Visual Arts and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.
http://midnightsuncameraobscura.com
Thaddeus Helownia, Sussex New Brunswick (detail).
Sous-exposés
Photographies des membres de l’Académie royale des arts du Canada
La Galerie d’art Stewart Hall est fière de présenter Sous-exposés, montrant le travail de 19 photographes. Sous- exposés constitue la toute première exposition de l’Académie entièrement consacrée à la photographie. Le corpus d’œuvre présenté reflète la diversité des tendances actuelles en photographie; il promet la visite d’espaces absorbants et la prise de connaissance du travail remarquable d’artistes canadiens renommés.
May 2 — June 21, 2015
VERNISSAGE : Dimanche 3 mai, 14 h
Under-Exposed
Photographs by Members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
The Stewart Hall Art Gallery is proud to present Under-Exposed, an exhibition that features the work of 19 outstanding photographers. Notably, this will be the first time the members of the Academy participate in an exhibition entirely dedicated to photography. Clearly, the vast array of subject matter explored in this exhibition reflects the diversity in current photographic tendencies, providing an absorbing visual experience and an opportunity for many to discover, or perhaps become reacquainted with, the work of these talented Canadian photographers.
VERNISSAGE : Sunday, May 3, 14 h
Galerie d'art Stewart Hall Art Gallery
Centre culturel de Pointe-Claire
176 chemin du Bord-du-lac / Lakeshore
Pointe-Claire (Québec) H9S 4J7
www.pointe-claire.ca
Untitled Photographic Pictures / Tableaux photographiques non-titrés
Galerie Patrick Mikhail MONTREAL LAUNCH
MARCH 20 - APRIL 28, 2015
PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY
GALLERY LAUNCH in MONTREAL
Vernissage: Friday, MARCH 20, 2015, 5:30 - 10:00 PM
4445 RUE SAINT-ANTOINE OUEST
(Lenoir & Saint-Antoine Ouest)
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
CANADA H4C 2Z6
T.: 514.439.2790
FOR MORE INFORMATION: MONTREAL@PATRICKMIKHAILGALLERY.COM
In Untitled Photographic Pictures, Andrew Wright explores points of intersection and exchange between several pictorial idioms and practices. Printed using some of the latest print-making technologies, these monumental pictures suggest the grandeur of classical painting, and raise the question of photography’s relationship with a tradition of producing and exhibiting large-scale gallery pictures. On the other hand, as a series of ‘straight-from-the-camera’ snapshots, this series was made using a uniquely photographic technique. The snapshot has become an important dimension of how we see and imagine the world today, and Wright contrasts this with the highly valued museum picture. The digital photographs themselves exhibit qualities that seem to emulate the effects of older lenses and photographic processes: inconsistencies, odd and unexpected optical effects, and the use of a pre-set, black-and-white treatment all contribute to evoking out-of-date, or even outmoded, pictorial concerns. The neglected and rural landscape captured in these photographs struggles to emerge as the subject of these pictures. Instead, Untitled Photographic Pictures explores an approach to photography in which ideas of the Romantic, the picturesque, and the monumental filter and condition our experience of the visible subject matter.
Ultimately, these photographs present themselves as straddling, and sometimes confusing, a variety of techniques and visual languages. Untitled Photographic Pictures is, in part, a series of landscape scenes. At the same, time this series is a further step in Andrew Wright’s ongoing investigation into the material and visual conditions that constitute photography as such.
In Conversation with Andrew Wright & Randy Innes
Thursday, March 5, 2015, 7pm | Free
Please note the location of this event: Club SAW, 67 rue Nicholas
Join us for an evening with Ottawa-based artist Andrew Wright hosted by cultural theorist Randy Innes. Refreshments will be served.
Andrew Wright is an artist and educator based in Ottawa. His artistic practice is at the intersection of traditional and conceptual forms of art-making. Wright's use of photography is decidedly non-conventional. Wright has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. In 2013, his mid-career survey exhibition titled Penumbra was a primary exhibition at Scotiabank CONTACT in Toronto. He has exhibited at various galleries and museums including the Xian Art Museum in central China, Presentation House, Vancouver; the University of California, Berkeley; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Photo Miami, Miami; Roam Contemporary, New York; ARCO '05, Madrid; and the Art Gallery of Calgary. He has also participated in residencies including The Banff Centre and Braziers Workshop (U.K.), and as a 'war artist' with the Canadian Forces Artist Program aboard Canadian warship H.M.C.S. Toronto. He is the founding Artistic Director for Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA). Wright is represented by Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Montreal & Ottawa. He is an Associate Professor of Visual Art and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.
Randy Innes holds a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester and he has taught at Trent University, Carleton University, and most recently the University of Ottawa. His research interests include the history and theory of photography, museum theory and exhibition practice, and aesthetic theory. Randy held the History of Photography research fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada, and he has published research and exhibition essays on historical and contemporary photography, along with other topics. Randy is currently with the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Presented in the context of the exhibition Pretty Lofty and Heavy All at Once in partnership with NAC'sOntario Scene.
Exhibition closing MARCH 8th: TODAY ART MUSEUM, Beijing
Michael Snow, Iain Baxter&, Edward Burtynsky, Wanda Koop, Andy Patton, Rebecca Belmore, Jamelie Hassan, Ron Benner, Bonnie Devine, Ed Pien, Robert Youds, Isabelle Hayeur, Jean-François Coté, Andrew Wright, Gu Xiong, Jolene Bailie with Gearshifting Performance Works. (Image: Isabelle Hayeur).
Pretty Lofty and Heavy All at Once
Ottawa Art Gallery
Curated by Ola Wlusek
A bilingual catalogue co-published with The Thames Art Gallery with texts by Randy Innes and Carol Payne accompanies the exhibition.
January 23rd - May 10, 2015.
Opening / Vernissage January 22nd, 2015.
While using current lens-based technologies, as well as processes derived from historical photography, Ottawa-based Andrew Wright’s art practice alludes to the immeasurable possibilities of the pictorial language.
The works in this exhibition present traditional subject matter derived from the natural world, such as the flora occupying rock formations found within a landscape, a snowy surface or turbulent waves suspended against the night sky, and the vastness of a treed horizon. Re-examined by the artist, these appear alien and inhabited due to the deliberately confused orientation of the camera. As seen in the Tree Corrections (2013) series, the trees are presented on a straight angle despite their true position, in turn making their surroundings visually unbalanced. Whereas the long exposure times used to create the series Still Water (2009) alter our normal perception of a waterfall.
The video Beijing Odyssey (2014) depicts the cityscape as witnessed from a hotel window. The blackness, with the exception of a digital billboard pulsating colour from beyond endless space, is in fact the outline of the buildings in front of it and proof that the void is not vacant. The transparent methodology of picture-making exposes the act of looking as limited and rehearsed. This experiment in visual organization disrupts our passive relationship to the recognizable shapes and forms, which exist in nature and man-made environments alike.
In his recent body of work, Wright introduces mirrored surfaces and physical objects as means to interrogate the trappings and appearances of the photographic. These works are evidence of the artifice used in mechanical production. Through the process of chroming, the objects acquire a reflective quality while becoming simultaneously static and ethereal. The silvering treatment causes the objects to be defunct, yet their multiple reflections makes the otherworldly visible.
The selected works, which span more than a decade, challenge conventional uses and accepted understandings of time-based practices. Pretty Lofty and Heavy All at Once acknowledges that the photographic found all around us is a paradox: what is in our direct line of vision may yet be beyond our ability to perceive.
Ola Wlusek, Curator of Contemporary Art
FLASH names three Ontario photographers to be featured at Jan. 23 event
Works reflect diversity of style and technique
WATERLOO REGION (December 15, 2014) – FLASH has named Mina Ao, Karl Griffiths-Fulton and Andrew Wright as featured artists for its Jan. 23 photography celebration at the Tannery Event Centre in Kitchener.
Multiple works by the three artists will be highlighted during a portion of the event devoted to professional area photographers. The evening will also feature images gathered in an open call to aspiring local photographers, and a headline presentation by Barbara Davidson, a Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times.
MONTREAL PREVIEW
October 8 – November 29, 2014
SCOTT EVERINGHAM
JENNIFER LEFORT
CHERYL PAGUREK
CINDY STELMACKOWICH
MICHAEL VICKERS
ANDREW WRIGHT
PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY in Ottawa is pleased to present
MONTREAL PREVIEW, an exhibition of new works by a selection of gallery artists. The featured works provide a preview of the exhibitions, projects, and artists on view at the gallery’s new Montreal space throughout 2015.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS CANADA PURCHASES WORKS BY ANDREW WRIGHT FOR CANADIAN EMBASSY IN LONDON
August 13, 2014
We are pleased to announce the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada has purchased two major works from the series Illuminated Landscapes by PMG artist Andrew Wright. Foreign Affairs Canada selected the large-format photographs "White Pines" and "Go Home Bay" as part of the art collection to be installed in the Canada House revitalization project. The photographs will be on display in the Embassy's public reception rooms when the refurbishment is completed.
MORE
Transformation of Landscape Art in Canada
Inside and Outside of Being
Xi'an Art Museum, Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China
www.CaCnArt.com
Curated by Yan Zhou, Yang Chao; Assistant Curator Christine Platt.
August 10 - September 21, 2014.
Artists:
Michael Snow
Iain Baxter&
Edward Burtynsky
Wanda Koop
Andy Patton
Rebecca Belmore
Jamelie Hassan
Ron Benner
Bonnie Devine
Ed Pien
Robert Youds
Isabelle Hayeur
Jean-François Coté
Andrew Wright
Gu Xiong
Jolene Bailie with Gearshifting Performance Works
Andrew Wright: Selected Diptychs & Multiples
Thames Art Gallery, Chatham Cultural Centre, Chatham, Ontario
Curated by Carl Lavoy, Text by Randy Innes
June 27 - August 24th, 2014
Reception Saturday, July 12th, 8pm
Andrew Wright Visits Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick
The Visiting Artist Program Presents: Andrew Wright
Wednesday March 19, 2014, 7:30 PM: ARTIST TALK
Owens Art Gallery, 61 York Street.
Thursday March 20: STUDIO VISITS
While Andrew Wright will visit the studios of students from the Mount Allison University Department of Fine Arts earlier in the day, there are a few spots reserved for studio visits with artists from the community in the afternoon. If you are interested in meeting with Andrew in your studio in Sackville, please contact Amanda Fauteux at info@strutsgallery.ca. The studio visit spots will be filled first come, first serve. Deadline for artists from the community to sign up is 5pm on Wednesday March 20.
The Visiting Artist Program is coordinated by the Mount Allison University Department of Fine Arts, Owens Art Gallery, and Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre.
Andrew Wright: Penumbra appears in CV (Ciel variable) Magazine, Issue #96, February 2014
Antique Cloud #1, Alumitype (Wet Plate Collodion), 4 x 5 inches (15.25 x 16.5 inches framed), 2011
Andrew Wright: Penumbra
Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival Primary Exhibition
University of Toronto Art Centre, May 2 -- June 29th, 2013
A mid-career survey exhibition including works from 2001 to the present.
Curated by Bonnie Rubenstein and co-organized with UTAC.
http://scotiabankcontactphoto.com/primary-exhibitions/1348
Press about the exhibition:
• Canadian Art Magazine says "Andrew Wright's Contact Show Shoots High"
• Now Magazine's "10 Essential Shows @ CONTACT"
• Toronto Star's "Exhibitions to Focus On"
• Azure Magazine's "10 Photographers You Need to Know About"
• ARTORONTO.CA
[Penumbra: The penumbra (from the Latin paene "almost, nearly" and umbra "shadow") is the region in which only a portion of the light source is obscured by the occluding body. An observer in the the penumbra experiences a partial eclipse. An alternative definition is that the penumbra is the region where some or all of the light source is obscured. More simply: a shadowy, indefinite or marginal area where both light and dark meet.]"As the exhibition title Penumbra aptly suggests, Andrew Wright creates images that investigate half-lights, zones, and procedures where the ambiguity of what we are seeing extends to an uncertainty about how the work was created, or even if we are looking at photographs at all. Using a wide range of photographic means, he works with what light can reveal and hold open so that we may explore the edges of perception and understanding. This mid-career survey of works from 2001 – 13 includes selections from several of Wright’s series, as well as a number of studies that reflect his experimental approach to image-making."
Continue reading..UTAC Brochure with brief descriptions of the works in the exhibition (pdf)