JAN 16 – FEB 9, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 18th, 2pm – 4pm

TROCH, BRIAN BAXTER, ALAN SIRULNIKOFF, ALANNA WOOD | Unshuttered: From Lens to Print (photography)

Four local Sunshine Coast photographers with diverse approaches and individual philosophies unite to explore photography as an art form. Photographs, which are so common in our everyday life, become an art form rather than a form of advertisement or entertainment because of their content, the photographer’s mindset, the message, and the composition. Using a variety of techniques, tools, and processes, troch, Brian Baxter, Alan Sirulnikoff, and Alanna Wood illustrate the diversity of photography as an artistic medium. The photograph as an exhibited object challenges the viewer to stop, look, see and contemplate.

Echoing a deep connection with nature and a modicum of subversive commentary, troch’s traditional silver gelatin print photography utilizes special darkroom techniques and manipulations, including multiple high exposures, high contrast, lith printing and chromo.

Capturing reflections of colours, patterns, textures, and compositions, Brian Baxter draws on a form of meditation called Miksang, in which the artist trusts their heart to see and records quickly before the process of restriction or overthinking takes over. A larger composite of images appears, suggesting further possibilities for abstraction and for insight.

Using slide films and natural light as illumination, in this series of work titled Stilled Life Alan Sirulnikoff highlights a connection with the subject of an image at a precise moment in time, evoking something beyond what might be seen at first glance; an underlying remnant, a Stilled Life.

When out in the community Alanna Wood photographs whatever subject has caught her attention, and when at home, she sets up vignettes and photographs still lifes, sometimes using the image altering/enhancing tools provided by her cell phone camera. All of her photographs are taken with just the camera in her cell phone.

RICHARD CHARTER | Vertical Human Horizontal World (mixed media)

In Vertical Human Horizontal World, musician and artist Richard Charter uses thread and ink to translate musical scores into visual artworks, creating symbolic representations of music notations. Charter’s works, without the production of any actual decibels of sound, allow the viewer to engage with and intuit their own narrative from musical scores, fulfilling an act that is entirely musical in nature whether the viewer is a trained or untrained musician or a hearing or non-hearing person. The abundance of straight layered lines and the contrast of the vertical and horizontal in Charter’s work provides reflection on both the significance of the line in musical notation and on our sense of self in relation to our landscapes. The title of the exhibition takes its inspiration from Canadian Prairie Poetry, where the poet is often struck by the image of the human as a vertical intrusion in an otherwise horizontal landscape, eternally returning to levelness.

Richard Charter is an artist and musician based in Vancouver, BC. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Piano Performance from Ambrose University in 2015. In 2020 he received a Master’s Degree in Music Composition from the University of Victoria. Charter’s music has been performed in venues throughout western Canada, and his visual art has been exhibited in Alberta and British Columbia.

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