CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL PRESENTS: MINI EDITIONS

Capture Photography Festival held a fundraiser earlier this February that featured a mini survey of limited edition prints by local and national talent. Vancouver's Danny Singer, Scott Massey and Birthe Piontek all released editions in collaboration with the festival in order to help Capture raise funds for this year's festivities. Montreal based photographer Jessica Eaton will also release a limited edition work based off of her public installation that will launch around the same time as Capture Photography Festival commences.All four artists have very different approaches to contemporary photography as the resulting images from this mini edition demonstrate.

The Capture Mini-Edition set is an excellent way for young art aficionados to start building their own contemporary collections. For those looking to support a local photography festival and to acquire some brilliant photographs, look no further, this mini collection is a fantastic introduction to Canadian Contemporary Photography.

Mini Edition Info, Images and Artist Bios:

Danny Singer, Trossachs, 2005/2014, 6.25” x 23”, archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist & Gallery Jones. Ed. Of 100

Composed of dozens of photographs digitally layered together into a single image, Danny Singer’s Trossachs depicts the southern Saskatchewan hamlet of Trossachs, population 42. Singer creates his works by moving his camera slowly down the main streets of prairie towns, taking photographs every few feet to develop a final, flat depiction of the entire street in extreme detail. His images are normally presented at a massive scale of six to nine feet wide, but for the Capture Mini Editions series, Trossachs has been shrunk to just under two feet.

Edmonton-born, Vancouver-based photographer Danny Singer has been capturing the main streets of small prairie towns in panoramic photographs since 1999. His photographic career began in film, as a cameraman and director for the CBC, moving into still photography when he relocated to Montreal in 1970. Singer’s work is held in public collections across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon. Danny Singer is represented by Gallery Jones, Vancouver.

Birthe Piontek, Trouts, 2013, 8” x 10”, archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist. Edition of 50

Birthe Piontek’s edition, Trouts, is selected from her Lying Still series, which began as a visual diary of the artist’s journey through a sickness but transformed to take on larger themes of change, aging, and individuation. Comprised of self-portraits and still lifes, Lying Still explores conscious and unconscious aspects of the human condition, from sexuality and desire to mortality and fear, and our responses to the inescapable force of change.

Birthe Piontek is a German-born, Vancouver-based artist, whose photographic practice focuses on portraiture while also incorporating elements of installation and sculpture. Her work is held in private and public collections around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and the Museum of Applied Arts, Gera, Germany, and has been published in Le Monde, Wired, and the New Yorker, among others. Her most recent series, The Idea of the North (2008–10), won the Critical Mass Book Award. Birthe Piontek is represented by Charles Guice Contemporary, New York, and Kominek Gallery, Berlin.

Scott Massey, Spectrum Study 4 (infrared), 2014, 11.5” x 12.5”, archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist. Edition of 50

Scott Massey’s Spectrum Studies series explores the spectrum of visible and invisible light waves that illuminate our world, with each study capturing a “durational landscape” in a single print. His contribution to the Capture Mini Editions series, Spectrum Study 4 (infrared), was shot on rare infrared film, resulting in a rich and lush colour palette that belies the landscape’s harsh topography and history. The work depicts the Hope Slide, Canada’s largest ever landslide, to which Massey is returning for his next photography series, presented at Burnaby Art Gallery during Capture 2.0.

Scott Massey obtained his BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2003 and has since appeared in group and solo shows across the country, including at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Dazibao Gallery, Montreal; the C. H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; the Surrey Art Gallery; and Luminato Festival, Toronto. Massey most often works with the medium of light, manifesting as photography but also as installation, sculpture, and video. He currently lives and works in Vancouver.

 Jessica Eaton, Edition of 50

Jessica Eaton’s Capture Mini Edition is a scaled-down version of her public art installation at Dal Grauer Substation, which draws inspiration from the building’s midcentury architecture and minimalist artists like Sol LeWitt. This brand-new work employs Eaton’s trademark photographic process, by which she creates intensely coloured photographs using black-and-white film. She accomplishes this by “mixing” light within an analogue camera directly onto the film, using photo filters and multiple exposures to manipulate the photographic process.

Regina-born artist Jessica Eaton is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is currently based in Montreal. Her practice revolves around the chemical and material aspects of photography, using analogue techniques to create images that look more like paintings than photographs. She has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions and was recently called “the hottest photographic artist to come out of Canada since Jeff Wall” by the Guardian. Eaton will launch Wild Permutations, her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, in February 2015. Jessica Eaton is represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto; Higher Pictures, New York; and M+B, Los Angeles.

 

For more information on the Mini-Editions from Capture, visit: http://capturephotofest.com/  or email Meredith Preuss: info@capturephotofest.com