The genre of the peripatetic poet has long been established as a romantic and idealized way of seeing the world. From Aristotle to Hamish Fulton, the act of walking has become intricately bound to the ways we think and see the world as a body in motion. Turning our attention to an unincorporated section of the Regional District of Nanaimo (aka Area A) for his solo exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Peter Culley, along with his dog Shasta, rambles through industrial ruins and trailer parks, past forests, farms, and reserves, and down abandoned roads and railroad tracks, all the while with a digital camera in hand.
Peter Culley
Primarily known as a poet whose recent book, Parkway, focuses on the lived narratives of his home town of Nanaimo through its imagined fictionalization by the late French novelist George Perec, Culley's literary style is imbued with single line gestures. They are not quite snapshots, but fragments that find a parallel world in his photography. With Shasta as the primary subject, the works in Area A have the explorative energy of any adventure about a boy and his dog. As an exhibition splayed over four walls, they are much too crowded and compulsive for moments of exaltation, but the exhibition essay/letter by Culley gives the show its needed illumination:
The process of making images has become, for me, so embedded in the dailiness of walking that I have been able to cultivate within their space and time a version of the directed semi-consciousness with which I write poetry. And the part of my poetry devoted to lyrical description and transcription, the atavistic impulse to capture reality as it recedes, has drifted into my photography.
Transferring the fleeting moments of a walk into digital photographs, of taking pictures along with the written note, Area A is a visual exercise from the eye of a poet, whose love for his landscape circles past the mundane and into a lifelong curiosity.
Charles H. Scott Gallery: http://chscott.ecuad.ca/
Peter Culley: Area A continues until July 6.
Amy Fung is a writer and organizer who publishes nationally and internationally in journals, magazines, catalogues, and monographs in print and online. Her ongoings can be found at POSTpacificPOST.com and on Twitter @anotheramyfung. She is Akimblog's Vancouver correspondent.
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Peter Culley at the Charles H. Scott Gallery
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