Glebe art gallery Studio Sixty-Six’s newest photography exhibit, The New Photographers, highlights emerging talent across North America, according to the gallery’s curator Carrie Colton.
Colton said she was enthusiastic about the six emerging artists whose works were selected from a number of applicants. The artists themselves are from all over North America, and though they all work in with photography, each artist has a unique style that immediately sets them apart, Colton said.
“There’s a lot of diversity. The only thing that they have in common is that they’re all emerging. They’re all photographers, but their aesthetic is all very different. Their subject matter is all very different, which is very interesting,” Colton said.
Two artists featured in The New Photographers include University of Ottawa student Saleena Wedderburn as well as Carleton student Olivia Johnston.
Wedderburn’s three pieces are in a self-portrait style, where she said she attempted to portray who she believes others perceive her to be in the most literal sense, donning a blonde wig and painting her skin a pale white in one of the pieces.
“What inspired me was kind of my upbringing, and growing up in a white majority town, and being the only black child around, and not really having any black friends,” Wedderburn said. “When I met people, and I came to university, people always called me white-washed. And I never understood the term really, because the way I look at it, I was just being myself.”
By playing on a frequently debated topic, Wedderburn said she hopes to connect to other Canadians from different backgrounds who can relate to the story that her photographs tell.
“In the future, I would like to take the persona of myself out into the public, and video tape myself or record myself interacting with people, just getting a kind of comment as far as what they think of my image as a white person.”
Johnston, like Wedderburn, said she hopes others are able to see a connection to their own lives in her work. By combining photography and collage styles, her simple but poignant pieces are, by her own description, reminiscent of journal pages.
“I consider every image that I create to be a kind of self-portrait. It’s a representation of what I like, what I want to depict,” Johnston said. “It’s pretty complex, and I like that, that I’m able to say so much in just this one piece.”
The exhibit is scheduled to run until Oct. 5.
