Throughout his practice, Howard Ursuliak works within the documentary tradition to explore an urban experience centered around the viewer's relationship to the commodity as well as to pictorial space, which is ordered according to the relationship of the subject to its environment, and vice versa.

The series Vestiges has evolved out of past work and personal experience to investigate the artist's own relationship to particular spaces. Ursuliak is interested in the meaning behind his presence in the work, which he intimates in images that often suggest the trace of another's presence. The questioning and investigation of our relationship to objects - commodity fetishism - is a thread that runs through Ursuliak's work, as in his Market series, where former commercial sites are revealed as physical structures designed to support the systems of economic exchange upon which many of our relationships are based.

According to the artist, his work begins with a compulsion to engage the world through the camera, then develops into an examination of the determination of value as related to experience rather than meaning. In addition he investigates the process of seeing and where the compulsion to look comes from by highlighting the spatial relationship between the photographer, subject and the viewer, resulting in an ambiguous sense of intimacy and alienation.