Our 3rd annual photography exhibit features the work Edward Carson, Graham Davies, Steven Draper, Sally McKay LePage, Lori St. Clair and Julia Zander. Click below to read more about our artists in the gallery.
Edward Carson
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The great mercy and grace of photography is that it finds all it takes in to be utterly irresistible. My Art is dedicated to the notion that digital photography and image editing software are rapidly expanding the borders and the potential for a whole new form of Art. We become a part of what we know through the capture and manipulation of what we see. The digital world becomes an art of balance and motion, controversy and eloquence.
Graham Davies
Graham Davies is a Welsh-born Canadian photographer who lives and works in Prince Edward County. He's worked in black and white for more than 40 years with press photography, theatrical portraits and documentary work. He now shoots digital for commercial work, but his personal work and fine art images are still exclusively black & white, using his favorite old cameras, real film and the darkroom to produce haunting images such as these, hand-printing and toning the originals on fibre-based, archival papers.
Despite the limitless possibilities of digital manipulation, he prefers the magic of the darkroom and says his images are conceived in the light and delivered in the dark.
The Royal series began as a project to record the last residents of the historic Royal Hotel in Picton and morphed into a work of fantasy.
Talking about the project he wonders, "Did the Royal somehow use me to tell her stories? The scenes are fiction, of course, inspired by her dark, cloistered silence. But who knows? Maybe some of the spirit, or spirits, of the Royal Hotel live on in these pictures."
Steven Draper
"Focusing all the energy of a single moment into one space, my prints are not the end of the artistic process - they are the window where the journey deep into our minds begins."
Steven is an Award winning photographic artist who's exceptionally limited Signature Edition prints, frequently study the integration of light with everyday life in an intense yet sensitive personal style that is fast becoming part of many collections across Canada and Europe. He lives on a hill top farm in Prince Edward County, with his wife and 3 boys, is Chair of a successful local art gallery, Sandbanks Provincial Park artist in resident 2009 and has a number of exhibitions planned for 2010/11
As a commercial airline pilot with thousands of hours of world wide flying, Steven has literally lived in the sky, developing a close affinity with the subtleties of the clouds and the freedom being airborne brings. Wishing to combine his artistic vision with a place he knows so well, Steven helped to develop what became the most advanced, custom made telescopic mast system of its kind in North America.
"The perspective I work with provides a freedom from the earth, yet remains intimate to everything we are all so familiar with.”
Sally McKay-LePage
I take digital photographs of everyday objects, ordinary and unremarkable objects that are practical, domestic and wholly forgettable if not for the functions they perform. Surrounded by potential subject matter I choose household objects that suggest to me a worth that is far more engaging than that which the subjects intrinsically convey. Framed up-close, digitally altered and produced as large format prints these objects denote significance far more notable than either their purpose or the task they perform. They are signs of a cultural consciousness which in many ways define how and to what our society assigns value.
The kitchen sink is arguably the most loaded symbol of domesticity. Who hasn’t heard the cliché “chained to the kitchen sink” or at least felt its significance. This series is a reflection of the time spent hovered over a sink watching the water drain. The series suggests that what might at first seem tedious and rather unremarkable is now and has the potential to be truly wondrous
Lori St. Clair
I see art and creativity in its various manifestations: music, dance, theatre, visual art, writing, etc, as a portal to a transcendent life. I describe this life as; dynamic, adventurous, passionate, noble, sacred, and unique. I believe this kind of life searches for magical moments throughout our lifetime. It reaches beyond the commonplace and mediocre and learns to listen for a 'Voice', Who is looking to identify with the human soul. A World of Promise waits to be revealed. The key to unlocking it is Desire. I see myself as a labour-coach who assists in birthing new vision in someone who may be searching for something that presently abides in obscurity. I am excited to be a factor in someone's equation that is reaching for a decisive action. I live in hopeful expectation that through my work I may provoke an individual to action, to explore at least a single direction that lies beyond their safe boarders which they will find in the realm of endless possibility as they reach out.
The exhibition of Vintage Cars reminds me that we were once concerned with aesthetics in design, appealing to our intrinsic nature. I believe we've compromised ourselves in focussing only upon function. Let's resurrect the nature of creativity – artistry and inspiration.
Julia Zander
Masculine & Feminine Series:
This series explores the duality of gender that exists in each person through a translation of masculine and feminine aspects of their personality. This series is a study of the differences between male and female characteristics of an individual and how that individual interprets the masculine and feminine concepts of gesture, body positioning and the gaze. By documenting people who come dressed in clothing that represents masculine and feminine aspects of their personality, they come to the shoot as themselves, bringing their own background and understanding of what represents concepts of the masculine and feminine in themselves and in relation to society. This series references the nude figure studies painted by Surrealist painter, Rene Magritte that both objectify the female body and depict it as a projection of his imagination that force the viewer to fill in the blanks. The photographs are shot in sections from head to toe for each side and printed on 5 ft raw canvas like an exquisite corpse drawing. The masculine and feminine portraits are laid out side by side and the end result is a portrait that splits an individual into two figures of themselves viewed next to each other.
Polaroid Tree Series:
The Polaroid Tree Series is a study of light and nature and its relationship with spirituality and the unknown space between what we see and what we cannot explain. Some people see this space explained through spirituality and religion while others use scientific reasoning to establish conclusions about what exists in space beyond what we can see. The Polaroid Tree Series is an exploration of this undefined space, a gateway between the physical space we see and that space which we attempt to define and rationalize. This series is a neutral portal that opens the doors to questioning this space, leaving it open for individuals to interpret it for themselves based on their own history, theories and belief systems.
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