Passages

Documentary photography and non-abstract imagery provide viewers with structural keys for understanding the artist’s intent for their work.  It is direct, and records a moment in time with adequate contextual information to understand the intent of the work.  The significances implied, and meanings conveyed, are clear and un-ambiguous.

Familiar images decomposed from their original referential context provide opportunity for new meanings.   Figure and ground become interchangeable, purely dependent on the viewer’s focus and individual life experiences. This reductive contextual isolation opens the resultant image to individual and personal re-interpretations – both intended and unintended by the Artist.

Significance and Meaning are not isolated within the specific part of an image.  The complete story is only realized through the composition of the individual components and when linked together, they can paint the greater story intended for the viewer.

A semiotic approach to visual imagery would suggest the presence of a code or set of conventions to communicate meaning.  An example is the use of colour to imply emotions (red = anger; blue = sadness), or the invocation of seasonal imagery to reference the life cycle of nature (Autumn of Life) .

Such visual codes are linked and structured by social experience.  Every individual will interpret the components of a story differently.   Suggestions can be drawn from the constituent parts of the intended narrative, however, they may be fundamentally different for each individual when isolated from the whole.  (Red = Danger; Blue = Cold)

With the static understanding dissolved, a dynamic interaction is re-structured by the interplay of form and colour.  The composition is re-shaped by the viewer’s personal experiences and sub-conscious memories.  Each image becomes its own unique passage in a new narrative linked to both precedent source and antecedent interpretation.

The current suite of images evolved out of figure ground photographs of cow hides at the 2010 Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. The images were composed to remove identifiable references to the actual subject matter and direct the viewers experience to the resultant pattern, colour, and textural composition. In the development of the work, limitations of digital imagery such as pixilation and artifacting were deliberately used as compositional tools to further remove the images from their original contexts. The resultant abstractions provide a rich tableau for viewer interpretation.