Presented in conjunction with Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival, the group exhibition Wayward was curated for Winsor Gallery by Kimberly Phillips of Access Gallery. The exhibition title suggests a kind of deviation or unpredictability, and the selected works depart from photography as it is more simply understood, but waywardness in photography is more conventional than one might think. Phillips notes in her exhibition essay that since the first decade of photography’s existence, “a certain anxiety was detectable in the writings of the new technology’s practitioners, who confessed their inability to fully control or ‘fix’ the medium.” By the ease of which certain works on view here stretch what can be considered photography, that anxiety appears to have long since dissipated. 
Jason Gowans, California Drought Winter 2015, LA River (After Chinatown) 1, 2015, tri-colour pigment print with UV/infrared spectrum
Dana Claxton and Ed Spence consider the pixel in digital images where skin becomes squares. Claxton’s Glama stretches a low-resolution image beyond clarity, and the result appears to be a sexualized videogame character, but is this combative profile one of female empowerment or objectification? The scale suggests a little of both. Spence takes a section of a simple but alluring photograph of an isolated dancer, cuts it into little squares, and rearranges them back into the negative space as a geometric pattern. The gesture adds compelling texture to the photograph and, accidentally or intentionally, references “the body”, but it seems secondary, or a bonus, to the artist’s act of pixilation.
Collage and found imagery are the most prominent alternatives to straight photography in this exhibition and a testament to our era of cut-and-paste reflexes. Lili Huston-Herterich’s Shards (Fermentation of a Whole New Earth) are hand-formed ceramic pieces with litho-transfers of photographs and glimpses of home fermentation forums. Laurie Kang’s Parallelogram Studies emphasize process to the umpteenth degree as the work is both a study of loose and satisfying compositions, as well as reactive since she collages with unfixed, light sensitive photo paper. Many of the works in the exhibition seem to be multitasking mediums. The overall embrace of experimental approaches results in the more conventional or depictive works, such as Colin Smith’s camera obscura environments and Jason Gowan’s infrared journey down the LA River, falling a little flatter in comparison.
Photography has long been chemically prodded, cut, and ripped, and has had its properties redefined and then canonized. The more processual and materially athletic works in this exhibition reflect an agenda that embraces the continual permutation of a seemingly received format, but that waywardness is not so much radical as it is ritual – a scheduled reinvention taking place every decade or so as if destabilizing its own canon. What was once an anxiety is now a hobby. Wayward remains a survey of photography, but it is photography in the earliest stages of its next permutation.
Winsor Gallery: http://www.winsorgallery.com/index.asp
Wayward continues until May 2.
Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. Currently, she is writing a book of letters and stories pertaining to smoking and editing a book of writings by Tiziana La Melia.
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Wayward at the Winsor Gallery, Vancouver
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