Light Gestures

Light Gestures brings together three artists (Daniel He, Richelle Forsey, & Sonya Filman), who employ intuitive approaches to create work using alternative photographic processes.

Light Gestures foregrounds the act of photography and its processes as a performative experience, where the image-maker rediscovers the self, using the stillness of darkroom processes and the tactile nature of the image as an art object. In 1994 Geoffrey Batchen addressed prior attempts in reinventing photography’s status as an art object and concluded, “Photography was accused from the beginning of taking the creative act out of human hands and consigning it to a machine. Hence the resistance to the acceptance of photographs as art objects.”* Batchen’s reflection on the Post-Photographic era implies, if nothing else, that photography is a complex phenomenon and deserving of constant questioning.

These three artists examine photography as it struggles to define itself in the Post-Photographic age. The imperfect, fragmented image yet again gains precedence as artists reinvent new ways of exploring historical processes, and further engaging in critical dialogue around contemporary photographic practices. The film renaissance as it is observed in the 21st century yet again emphasizes the artist’s hand, reworking darkroom prints, manipulating light and chemistry; the pixelless and sometimes, cameraless image.

Text by Ananna Rafa

*https://medium.com/@stevekemple/images-in-crisis-a-conversation-with-geoffrey-batchen-dffbaf820270

Light Gestures
September 11 – October 24, 2020
Open Wed-Sat, 12-5
Gallery 44, 401 Richmond Building, Toronto, ON