Stranger Than Fiction, an exhibition co-curated by Emmy Lee Wall (Executive Director, Capture Photography Festival) and Birthe Piontek (Assistant Professor, Audain Faculty of Art) featuring work of 17 emerging Emily Carr University artists will open to public April 6 as part of the 2022 Capture Photography Festival.

This exhibition is the culmination of Capture x Emily Carr, a year-long partnership between Audain Faculty of Art, Shumka Centre for Creative Entrepreneurship and Capture Photo Festival. Works exhibited were created during a partnered Photography course in Fall 2021 taught by Birthe Piontek, in which Emily Carr photography students received mentorship from Emmy Lee Wall and other leading industry professionals.

Stranger Than Fiction
April 6 – 30, 2022
Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Michael O’Brian Exhibition Commons Gallery, 1st Floor

Exhibition Related Events

Opening – April 6, 2022
5:00 – 7:30 PM                                                                                                             
Emily Carr University of Art + Design                                                                         
Michael O’Brian Exhibition Commons Gallery, 1st Floor
*subject to vaccination checks

Artist Talk  (Online) – April 20, 2022
6.00 – 7:00PM                                                                                                         
Information on Capture Photography Festival 

About Stranger than Fiction

What can a photograph reveal? This investigation lies at the heart of the work of 17 emerging, lens-based practitioners who comprise this exhibition. While photography has a long and fraught relationship with the truth, these artists use their works to probe what it is possible to know and delineate through photography, accepting as a given that truth is subjective, malleable, and time-specific.

Some works are process-based, exploring what it is possible for the medium to represent. Here the light-sensitive surface becomes a site of experimentation and the darkroom a playground to test the medium’s boundaries. These works investigate photography’s relationship to truth – the truth that comes in a recording of an artistic process, or a representation of a moment in time. Through methods of abstraction, these process-based works evoke the idea of illusion as they move away from the representational. They leave us wondering what we see in these images while simultaneously being faithful depictions of light, colour, and surface.

Others investigate identity and representation, questioning the ability to offer an honest or accurate representation of one’s self or one’s subject through photography – where does a performance for the camera begin and end? How can one use the camera to capture the reality of a relationship, which by its very nature is in-between, intangible and ever-changing? In many images, objects become laden with meaning, evoking an emotive or social truth beyond the thing itself. Others in the group consider space – both domestic and interior and that of the street – to explore the way in which their practices can depict change in familial relationships and urban landscapes. Through these explorations, these artists celebrate the complicated relationship between photography and truth, attempting to convey a veracity far deeper than that which is immediately visible.

Exhibiting Emily Carr Artists

David Aquino
BEX
Duncan Fitch
Sidney Gordon
Khim Hipol
David Macgillivray
Leo Mah
Meaghan Murray
Abigail Pfortmueller
Jordan Robertson
Tillie Roy
Gibson Switzer
Skye Tao
Jordan Utting
Emil Vargas
James Vincent
Liao Yi

Co-curated by Emmy Lee Wall and Birthe Piontek

Funding for this partnership and exhibition was provided by the Co-op and Work Integrated Learning Initiative of the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training as well as the Government of Canada’s Innovative Work-Integrated Learning Initiative operated by CEWIL iHUB as well as by a generous donation from Wesgroup.