A second edition of More Than the Eye Can See – artist and event organizer Greg Smith’s exploration of the potential of the photographic medium – is the current attraction at White Rock’s Landmark Pop-Uptown Gallery at Central Plaza (15140 North Bluff Rd.).
Work of a large contingent of Semiahmoo Peninsula photographers is gaining exposure through the show, co-sponsored by Landmark and the City of White Rock, in which the cast will change mid-month (after Sunday, Jan. 14) to display works by a new collection of contributors.
Judging by a viewing of the first half of the show, it is well meeting Smith’s criteria of showing the many artistic possibilities of the photographic medium, providing arresting images of many kinds just as deserving of space on local walls as painted or drawn media.
Participants in the first segment include such well-known photographers as Don Hudson, Lynn Kelman (former president of the Crescent Beach Photography Club), her husband Ron, and Tharaka Mapalagawa, a member of both the Surrey and Crescent Beach photography clubs.
Also very much in evidence are members of the White Rock-based Praxis Photo Collective – Jan Lyle, Gary Kennedy, Linda Bickerton-Ross, Barbara Cooper and George Omorean.
The show is a demonstration of how a photographer’s eye can find pictorial opportunities in virtually every setting, whether across the globe or close to home, and with virtually any level of equipment.
As a displayed quotation from David Alan Harvey exhorts: “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.”
Ron Kelman’s and Barbara Cooper’s images, for example, show how travel photos can far transcend the usual holiday snapshots, while Lyle points out that most of her intriguing pattern-heavy imagery in the show was captured on a cellphone, either in her garden or within a block of her home.
Kennedy’s and Bickerton-Ross’ work again shows the aspect of opportunity in capturing widely diverse images. Kennedy finds fascinating textures in Fraser River scenes, while Bickerton-Ross utilizes slow exposures and other manipulation to create dreamlike, semi-abstract scenes offering a new perspective on familiar landscapes.
Omorean’s experimental approach almost puts him in a class by himself in the show – with such images as Infra Island Road – an infra-red photo of a palm tree-lined road in the Cook Islands, enhanced by silver-gelatin printing, while the abstract Violin Strings and Scroll is a camera-less photogram of violin parts along with electric sparks on a sheet of photographic film.
But the show also demonstrates the enduring viability of gallery-style work, as embodied by photographs by Hudson, Mapalagawa and Lynn Kelman.
Hudson’s Peppers! is an old-school, monochrome homage to Edward Weston, utilizing a 1940s Graflex 4x5 camera and painstaking focusing, developing and printing techniques to make the most of form composition and texture.
Kelman, too, produces amazing textural results, in colour prints using groupings of fruit and other objects against black velvet.
Mapalagawa’s painterly figurative work, shot against a plain grey wall in his home, juxtaposes human subjects with carefully chosen props, sometimes producing surreal effects reminiscent of Man Ray, but also employs mixed media by applying paint and brush to photographic prints.
More Than the Eye Can See continues at the Landmark Pop-uptown Gallery until Jan. 28; hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily from Wednesday to Saturday.
