The Monte Clark Gallery Toronto is pleased to present the exhibition
"Vancouver Apartments" 1997-1998 by Vancouver photographer Chris Gergley.

Janaury 6 - February 6, 2005
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 15th from 2:00-4:00pm.
Artist will be in attendance.

Exhibited in a series of forty-eight, each identically formatted image bears a striking similarity to the others while revealing the differences particular to each one. By presenting the lobbies of apartments visible behind glass entrances, variations in décor, lighting, colour and ‘personality’ emerge from banal mid-century architecture, becoming metaphorical of human beings’ simultaneous unity and individuality, while the large windows, for Gergley, ‘offer a complete exchange of visual information from the subject’s illuminated room into the camera’s “darkened room”’.

Gergley’s work centers around the role of the photographer in relation to various methods ranging from the classical still-life to the snap shot, and this series is at once an application of typological photography and a refinement of the analytical device of framing found in such work. It is also reminiscent of filmic framing devices, giving the work a Hitchcockian appeal, which is reflected in the film-strip style of installation in the gallery. As Gergley says: ‘It is the camera’s inherent “framing” requirement that has become the analytical tool that assists in recovering knowledge from the subject’. Throughout the history of photography and indeed the natural sciences, typology has been used to clarify thinking. From the oceanic and plant studies of Ernst Haeckel and Karl Blossfeldt through to photographer August Sander and the work of pioneering conceptual photographers Berndt and Hilla Becher, classification of forms has been used to define how relationships work and has been instrumental in documenting the oneness of the world in its most diversified forms.


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VESTIGE: Recent Photo Works by Howard Ursuliak

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