Andrew Wright is an artist who lives and works in Waterloo. He has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions at the University of California, Berkeley, Oakville Galleries, Roam Contemporary (New York), ARCO '05 (Madrid), Presentation House, Vancouver and the Art Gallery of Calgary, to name a few. He has also participated in residencies including the Banff Centre and Braziers Workshop (U.K.), and recently as a 'war artist' with the Canadian Forces Artist Program aboard Canadian warship H.M.C.S. Toronto. He was the founding Artistic Director for Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA). Wright is the recipient of numerous awards. In 2001 he was the winner of the Ernst & Young Great Canadian Printmaking Competition, and has received grants from the Waterloo Regional Arts Fund, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. He has received critical acclaim for his work in publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and The Globe & Mail.

The artist wishes to thank the following: The Niagara Parks Commission, Matthew Carver, and Michael J. Ambedian"

"Standing Wave #3" 2007 Andrew Wright

Water's Edge
Andrew Wright is a multi-disciplinary artist who has been photographing subjects at night for the past 7 years. He has worked towards a particular kind of imagery that both identifies and challenges conventional uses and understandings of photographic practice. He creates images that sit on the edge of possibility—ones that are rife with the plenitudes of realistic detail and, at the same time, full of the potential energy of their own collapse—“a kind of wished-for uncertainty”

Partly as a result of a stint as a war artist aboard the HMCS Toronto in the North Atlantic in 2005, Wright turns his attention to water with this new and investigative body of work. These raw images of North America’s largest standing waves probe both fiction and reality. They are images of near impossible complexity that engulf, astound, and confound.

Shot precipitously close to the rapids of the Niagara gorge (Wright required a specially trained police escort to accompany him) and against dark grounds, these waters are perceptually removed from their real world context. The contradictions abound: standing waves are both static and dynamic; scale is confused as what can appear as miniaturized is in fact many meters tall; chaos and randomness appear to be at once organized in front of Wright’s lens.

His practice is one wherein images laud, reveal and question the conditions of their making. He continues to choose subject matter that is either minimal or barely existing or subjects that contain a staggeringly overwhelming fullness. His photographs of natural settings are objects and places that at first appear pure and unadulterated by human intervention. The imposition of artificial light not only serves to reveal and illuminate but renders the subject’s overt naturalism suspect. The descriptive visual plenty provided by the light serves, at the same time, to throw the image’s veracity into question.