Tori Foster, Copper Beech (2012), photograph [Esplanade Art Gallery, Medicine Hat AB, Sep 3-Oct 22]

Tori Foster, Japanese Maple (2012), photograph [Esplanade Art Gallery, Medicine Hat AB, Sep 3-Oct 22]

The past quarter century has seen a shift in what we think of when we think of photography. Like painting, which has outlived its obituaries, photography is no longer the product of boxed light and liquid chemicals but a shorthand for images manufactured through digital means. While contemporary artists like Jeff Wall have taken the medium to specific ends, artists like Tori Foster participate in myriad “lens-based” conversations.

Foster’s current exhibition features a range of photo-based works, from multiple perspective montages like Japanese Maple (2012), where the photographer “orbits” her “primary” source, to 5-channel installations like Continuous New York (2012), which allows the sleepless city to be absorbed “in its entirety while maintaining connection with the experience of individual place(s).”

Unlike photography’s earliest practitioners, who documented the world as it existed in that instance, Foster and Wall see their initial images closer to beginnings than as ends in themselves. For Foster, “captured imagery is treated as data, subject to a series of actions, and represented to expose alternate information inherent to, but not visible in, the original dataset.” Put another way, while technology has made it easy for us to take great pictures, not all of us can make them.”

esplanade.ca

Michael Turner

Tori Foster, Downtown (2014), photographic composite [Esplanade Art Gallery, Medicine Hat AB, Sep 3-Oct 22]

Tori Foster, Eight Street Car Shelters (Night) (2013), photographic composite [Esplanade Art Gallery, Medicine Hat AB, Sep 3-Oct 22]