April 01 - May 01, 2004

Andrew Wright | skies | review

> opening Saturday, April 03  | 2 - 6pm

Skies For his second solo exhibition of new work at Toronto's Peak Gallery, Andrew Wright creates large-scale photographic images of the sky. In transforming his studio into a giant camera by means of a makeshift lens and shutter in the roof, Wright's images record passing clouds and space. Wright turns the empty and the vast into compelling, subtle, and dramatic works. Exposed directly onto photographic paper, these images bear witness to unique moments that are full of faithful detail, yet betray nothing of their origins. A deliberate return to archaic technology, these images are as much about the nature of light as it is reorganized by a lens as they are about spare, subtle, and dramatic pictures of vapour, air, clouds, and space. They are simultaneously a record of the passage of light, the procedure itself, and evocative images of beauty and suggestion. By simplifying their making to the barest of elements, by pointing the camera skyward to both the void and the immense, these images become photographic conundrums. They are both simple and complex in their physical manifestation, they are images that are arbitrary and specific, and they appear as positives while, in fact, they are negatives.

"I am interested in these simple reversals as a means of subverting traditional photographic practice and as a way of re-configuring our visual understanding of the world around us." "Andrew Wright experiments with primitive photographic models in part to reestablish contact with the natural world. And like all contemporary embraces of the natural world, this may be seen to be an act of resistance to our contemporary monolithic political economy. Rudimentary tools and processes may free the individual artist from dependency on expensive equipment, materials, and processing costs. Fragile, hesitant and technically naive images are a rhetorical counter to the all pervasive commercial photo media environment. Stripping the photographic process down to its basic observable phenomena may slow the machinery of seduction, and makes us reflexively aware of the physical reality of this giant hall of mirrors in which we live." -Gordon Hatt, Curator, Cambridge Galleries.