The Poetics of Photomontage
Slide Room Gallery, Victoria, BC -
Colette Baty, Mark Goodwin and Avril Kirby
SLIDE ROOM GALLERY, VICTORIA BC - April 13 - 30, 2018
By Christine Clark
The Poetics of Photomontage curator Wendy Welch writes, “Why photomontage? It is the art of the everyday. Photomontage was common practice in the Victorian era when regular people were beginning to have access to reproduced images. I think of it as poetry with images.” This exhibit is an opportunity to revisit the power and the accessibility of this art form as seen through the diversity of technique embodied in the work of these artists.
Mark Goodwin, a successful businessman, prefers to create “minor changes” in his photomontage work, which is both sophisticated and sentimental. In Untitled (QE2 snowball fight), an intact image of a man and a boy throwing snowballs resembles a ‘50s-era automobile advertisement. Over the man’s face, and properly aligned with the movement of the body, is glued a five cent Canadian stamp featuring a young Queen Elizabeth II.
Colette Baty, a former critical care nurse, who currently serves as president of the board for the Vancouver Island School of Art, assembles photomontage works that are highly charged and urbane, filled with graffiti and people. Conversely, these images are also quite low-tech, made with scissors and glue and her own travel photographs.
Avril Kirby, a self-taught photographer, represented by Gallery 8 on Salt Spring Island, exhibits several pieces from her series Conversations with Thomas, her great-great- great grandfather. Kirby combines Thomas’ drawings of England and her own landscape photographs through a process of digital layering and creates exquisite composites spanning 200 years.
Opening Reception April 13, 7:30 pm
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