Phantom Presence: Contemporary Photography in New Brunswick
An excerpt of four images from my photographic series One Concierge and Seven Bellmen will be included in the exhibition, Phantom Presence: Contemporary Photography in New Brunswick, on display from June 25 — August 30 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton:
PRESS RELEASE—New exhibitions open June 25, launching the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s summer season. The public is cordially invited to attend the opening reception at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 5 pm. Featured this season are contemporary New Brunswick photographers, emerging artists, and a retrospective of photographic works by a trailblazing twentieth-century photographer.
Phantom Presence: Contemporary Photography in New Brunswick explores photography through a diversity of approaches, photographic technologies, aesthetic viewpoints, and contemporary visions as represented by the work of photographic artists Jaret Belliveau, Amanda Dawn Christie, Carol Collicutt, Kyle Cunjak, Oliver Flecknell, Rachael Leigh Flett, Julie Forgues, Frédéric Gayer, Paul Griffin, Peter Gross, Mathieu Léger, Annie France Noël, Sophie Polanski and Vitaly Korneev, Evan Rensch, Neil Rough, Karen Ruet, Karen Stentaford, and Christina Thomson. Aimed at chronicling and heightening the profile of recent creative developments in contemporary photography in the province, it demonstrates photography as a disciplined way of seeing within an open field of possibilities for the exploration and expression of ideas.
According to co-curator Terry Graff, “photographs are the result of subjective choice, and tell us more about the perspective and biases of the photographer than about the reality of that which is recorded. At once familiar and strange, they are shadows or reflections of the past existing in the present, an uncanny medium or a kind of ‘phantom presence’.”
“What the photographers in Phantom Presence share is a passion for the process and magic of the photographic medium, its ability to communicate visually, and preserve indefinitely,” says Karen Ruet, co-curator of the exhibition. “Theirs is a story that often pauses to hear the whispers of those who have come before, and speaks of loss, of curiosity, of the state-of-the-world we live in today. The makers are, in most cases, the phantom artists whose personal, indelible mark is in the very fabric of the work they create, but rarely are the creators immediately visible to the viewer. They hover under and over and on the periphery of every piece they make and we are aware of them through their craft, their inquiry, and masterful story telling ability.”
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