Marty Levenson - Photographer

Old-growth stumps, reminders of 120 years of logging, haunt the landscape of Bowen Island, my home on Canada’s west coast. In the margins between developments decaying debris clusters around the remains of 1000 year old trees, as erosion, water, insects, gravity, and animal activity soften them into strange shapes. The accumulation of windfall branches adds to the disarray, even as saplings and decades old trees emerge from the mulch. The resulting landscape is messy: unequal parts battlefield, graveyard and nursery.

Walking in this landscape feels like trespassing, as though the groves are inhabited by something unseen and perhaps menacing. It’s hard to find your footing. As my work leads into this dark territory it becomes metaphor for a psychological space, an interior yet foreign landscape that reflects our less rational thoughts and fears. Here the pretty and majestic standards of natural beauty we usually encounter yield to something deeper and less comfortable.

These five images, from the Elastic Forest series, reflect the story of our resilient nature, growth from decay to renewal to movement.

Russell Hackney- Ceramic Artist

Creating is like ‘finding’ in a way. I have the curiosity to see what happens if I ‘place that shape, that slight curve, against that straight edge’. I sometimes wonder if creating work is simply a way of communicating with the wider world what one ‘has found to be interesting’ or even beautiful, hoping that the viewer will be blessed or challenged by it.

I agree with the author Doris Lessing when she said:  “An artists job is to say ‘this is what I see”.   Much of my work is an attempt to speak into culture ‘what I see’.

Dane Murner- Photographer

After moving to Vancouver, BC, Dane began using photography as a means to catalogue and share his new environment with family. He in turn noticed the enlightenment gained from documenting the things he not only saw, but also felt. For Dane, photography is more than the calm, yet compelling scenes he captures in a frame. While fascinated with his environment, his photos are rarely about what a specific space presents as. Rather, his photography is about what that place can evoke in himself subconsciously. His approach to photography employs this balance of immersing himself in a setting through what he sees externally, while simultaneously looking inward, guided by his thoughts, feelings and memories. To not just look for certain subjects or spaces, but to reflect on how his subconscious interacts with the external world.

Dane’s photography encourages a memory or thought in the viewer, one of which you may not be able to describe or recall with words. The content in his photos are a result of human intervention and decision, despite no humans appearing in the frame. This tension with our surrounding environment, reveals ideas that were once forgotten or unconsidered; the photos themselves become the description of the memory or thought.

Cosmo Campbell- Photographer

Cosmo chooses monochromatic photography as a medium to explore the vulnerability of our existence and the depths that exist within it. His high-resolution graphic images provide hauntingly peaceful scenes that aim to draw viewers into a state of contemplative solitude. In this series of simulated nocturnal photographs he strives to create images that explore the tension of solitude, scenes that expose the beauty that can be found in the loneliest of places.

A need for soulful reflection drives Cosmo to create images that are both soothing and evocative.