Escape from Photography
Mark Crofton Bell
No Peeking
Erika Kierulf
Dates Showing: January 6th to February 9th, 2002
In Escape From Photography, Toronto artist Mark Bell addresses photography's strangle hold on representation in the 20th Century, and loosens its grip. Using imagery of photography's first 'victims'; the infirm, insane and criminal, Bell has reproduced their images in shades of off-black on black panels. Interestingly, his painted images are unreproduceable using photographic means. Bell's skillfully absent paintings touch on the subjectivity of these photographs as 'History' and the relationship between the photographer and his subject. Erika Kierulf, on the other hand, is using photography as less of a surveillance tool and more as a documentor of her daily activities.
In no Peeking, Montreal-based Kierulf is utilizing the medium to demonstrate the normalcy and subtle beauty of her life, even through her queer (read: deviant) relationship status. This is presented as the simple beauty Kierulf sees around her; in the domestic landscape, in her friends interacting, her partner. Whereas Kierulf enforces her normalcy by situating herself within the banality of her subject matter, Bell instills a slo panic about the 'normalcy' of his chosen imagery. As Kierulf draws us in with her beautiful captured 'instants', we understand these as random moments, that she has captured somewhat through happenstance. This gets complicated when posited next to Bell's work, as he questions his own faith in the objectivity of his source images, insisting on skepticism toward the objectivity of all reproduced images.
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