October 4, 2012 – January 18, 2013
FIRST CANADIAN PLACE GALLERY
100 King Street West
Toronto, ON M5X 1A9
T: 416-515-7667
E: jmcafee@budmanpr.com
Hours: Mon – Fri 11- 3 p.m.
The Quest for Beauty in a Garden – Elaine Waisglass Photography
Elaine Waisglass’s (www.elainewaisglass.com) photography exhibition, The Quest for Beauty in a Garden, running through until December 14, 2012 at First Canadian Place Gallery, is both inspiring and innovative. Executed as large and medium sized hand printed images using archival paper and inks, the exhibition is a unique collection of 16 limited-edition photographs fusing traditional ideas with the newest digital technology as well as a 20-minute, single channel video. The landscape and still-life photographs reflect a year in Waisglass’s own Toronto garden. Through her lens, the richly intense images appear almost painterly in their capturing of the arrested moment.
Waisglass’s work reaches back into art history to the 19th century Arts & Crafts movement’s quest for beauty. “The movement’s central concept of ‘the mutable moment’ (the quest for beauty, quickened by the inevitability of death) has become my own personal quest. In winter, long after the beautiful flowers of summer have faded, my photographs recall their beauty,” says Waisglass.
Waisglass studied fine arts and sculpture at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Waisglass’s background with her innovative camera techniques, allows her to work skillfully with the latest technology, bending natural light to create the illusion of a third dimension in a two-dimension format that reflects Waisglass’s quest for beauty in its most simple and enchanting form.
The exhibition is a celebration of the Arts & Crafts philosophy and Waisglass’s own home and garden – both heavily influenced by the international movement begun in the 1860s. Waisglass creates potent images that hover at the threshold between the real and the impossibly real.
Recently, Waisglass spent a year photographing different elements of the garden’s cycle – from numerous old rose species and peonies every June to hydrangeas, Japanese Anemones and oak leaves in October – producing her stunning first collection, A Year in My Arts & Crafts Garden.
Elaine Waisglass is represented by Edward Day Gallery.