patricia k. gagic

Avatar - Within and Beyond | January 22 - February 21, 2009

The Toronto Star

At the Galleries by PETER GODDARD

February 7, 2009

Patricia Gagic's evocative photo show at Peak Gallery (23 Morrow Ave. until Feb. 21) reminds us that the great thing about photography is that no one has figured it all out yet. Indeed, the intimacy and improvisatory nature of the Hamilton-based artist's work reminds us of the good things that happen when innocence leads to experimentation. There's nothing new here, but it still feels fresh. The domestic nature of the artist's vision gets quite daydreamy with the more purely abstract imagery in her "Remedy for Illusion" series.

Like many a photographer before her, Hamilton-based artist Patricia K. Gagic is clearly entranced with the idea of shooting through glass - through stained glass, in particular. This works reasonably effectively with the small colour photos from her Practical and Mystical series - woozy distortions of what seem to be vistas of her back garden, with sudden hi-focus areas, often featuring deer that have paused to gaze toward Gagic's far-off camera.

The stained-glass work appears to have given way, however, to the artist's subsequent exploration of the wonders of transparency per se, and her recourse to a kind of photo-rapture that informs the main part of her exhibition. Here, Gagic has produced a suite of six large photographs (called Remedy for Illusion) of what look like photos taken through shards of glass, through folds of tissue, through layers of transparent this and that. This results in each photo's becoming a plane of pure, formal composition, each careful arrangement coming on like some species of insubstantial crystallography. The pleasure to be derived from all this is the rather rudimentary one of comparing different densities of light. This doesn't seem a sufficient reward for all this highly self-conscious manipulation of the stuff Gagic gathers together.

My suspicion, though I don't know this for sure, is that Gagic possesses a mystic bent, and thinks of light as some sort of extrapolation of spirit. Why she calls these photographs Remedy for Illusion, by the way, is beyond me. They seem, rather, to plunge us more deeply into illusion - to a depth of sentimentality that is probably bad for your health.

about the exhibition