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Like the work of Robert Fones, these new photographs by Andrew
Wright (Skies) are more fun if you know what's going on. While
these big pearlescent, panoramic, black and white photos of bright
skies and silken clouds are undeniably lovely, they become a whole
lot lovelier still once you realize (or are told) that they are
the product of Wright's investigations into the possibilities
of the Camera Obscura.
Anyone who has seen the recent film of Tracy Chevalier's novel
about Vermeer (The Girl with the Pearl Earring) will remember
the artist's explanation of the helpful wonders of the Camera
Obscura, a black box into which light is admitted through a tiny
hole in one side and which light rays then come to organize themselves
on the box's far surface into a jewel-like, inverted image of
whatever the box's hole was pointed at. In Wright's case, the
Camera Obscura is his entire studio, the necessary light-admitting
hole being a shuttered opening in the roof, fitted with "a
single lens element (borrowed from a pair of eyeglasses)".
Wright unrolls sheets of photographic paper on a four-by-eight-foot
platform on the studio floor, exposes the paper for a few seconds,
and develops his resulting print: another passage of light and
cloud. Nice. Would these spacious photos be quite so absorbing
if they were just taken with a conventional camera? Not at all.
Except that Wright makes a good case for them when he points out
that his images are "counterphotographic", their subject
being "emptiness, water vapour, and light itself", that
they are without orientation (that is, there is no up nor down
to them), and that they omit anything approaching the virtuoso
"decisive moment" of meaningful exposure. These photos
just are. As such, they are more meditative than informative.
The eight etchings (Four Directions) making up this new
exhibition by Montreal-based painter, sculptor and musician John
Heward, are so deftly contrived, so elegantly wrought, so
formally inadvertent (or so it would seem), they are so much a
process of finding out direction by means of a studied indirection,
that it might be best to talk of them scarcely at all.
It might be best, if they just continue to hang there on the gallery
wall, breathing deeply, forming tiny theatres of quiet, centrifugal
excursions into mark-making, resonating, as Montreal critic James
D. Campbell puts it in a note accompanying the exhibition, between
"Reason and Emptiness, what is seen and what is sensed."
The Wright photographs are $2,400 each. The Heward etchings
are $250-$800. Until May 1, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.
about the exhibition |
