Else Marie Hagen, Panorama, 2009, 123 x 254 cm chromogenic print
September 14 – October 13, 2012
Opening reception: Friday, September 14, 6 – 9 p.m.
GALLERY 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
T: 416.979.3941
E: stu@gallery44.org
www.gallery44.org
Hours: Tue-Sat 11 – 5 p.m.
“An engagement with the materiality of the image is at work in Norwegian artist Else Marie Hagen’s photographs—the image itself is the subject of her photographs. She subverts conventions of pictorial representation through surprisingly low-tech means: sculptural presentations of images that oscillate between three dimensional and two dimensional space, compositions that challenge the distinction between the surface of the image and the pictorial space that it constructs, and images that deliberately obstruct the viewers identification with, or imaginary access to the image.” Amish Morrell, exhibition essay writer.
Else Marie Hagen, born 1963 in Stavanger, Norway, works with photography and photography based installations. Based on a conceptual approach, Hagen’s work explores and analyzes features of today’s normative visuality. It questions the image, both the meaning that might be derived from its formal qualities and the condition of the image as it appears in a wider social context. Hagen’s work has been acquired by public and private collections in Norway such as The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Nordnorsk Art Museum, Bergen Art Museum, Preus Museum, Statoil Art Collection, Storebrand Art Collection, Nordea Norway Art Collection.
Amish Morrell is Editor of C Magazine, a quarterly journal on contemporary international art, and Special Lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He has written for publications including Art Papers, Ciel Variable, Fuse Magazine, History of Photography and Prefix Photo. His curatorial projects include The Frontier is Here, an exhibition of works by contemporary Canadian and international artists that explore landscape and identity, and Nightwalks with Teenagers, a collaborative project to produce new artworks that investigate walking as aesthetic practice, produced by Mammalian Diving Reflex. He recently edited The Anti-Catalogue (The Model, 2010), a book on contemporary artists collectives, and is published in Byproduct: on the excess of embedded art practices (YYZBooks, 2010), edited by Marisa Jahn.