Vancouver, August 11, 2005 - The Monte Clark Gallery is pleased to announce Vestige, a solo exhibition by Vancouver based photographer Howard Ursuliak .

VESTIGE
August 11 — September 3, 2005

Vestige: what is left, what has been left of the past in the present - a suspended present. This has been photography's historical edifice. The trace (a trail) - what remains but continues to leave, to absent itself toward its past...that a photograph can pose for the senses is because pictorial space is composed of more than just what can be seen. It can offer touch and what is not visible can be felt. Likewise, we cannot see time, but we feel its passage. To remember is to anticipate the touch of what continues to leave.

- Howard Ursuliak

Howard Ursuliak's photographs are invariably seductive, though not typically so. There is a desire that moves toward a distinct human presence, yet no figure resides in his pictorial space. The sense one has while looking at a picture by Ursuliak is unmistakably that of being drawn inside, first physically, then mentally, then psychologically. His photographs have the uncanny ability to compel the viewer to graft their own personal sense of human presence into the image, hence their estranged seduction.

In Vestige, Ursuliak presents six large-scale works which make careful and deliberate use of scale, composition and subtle sensibility to capture generic urban spaces normally designated for private acts and unmarked occurences - a telephone booth, a bathroom stall - and offers viewers a performative space to ponder on those related intimate and solitary moments in their own psyches. Punctuated by a keen attention to the geometry of the pictorial planes and intersecting lines, all of the works depict spaces which pulse with social memory. Ursuliak is interested in this relationship between sense, memory and the photographic image, and while we remain wondering why there is something familiar in these places while realizing we may not actually know these places, his photographs figure as elegantly executed experiments in the power of photographic capture.

In the end, we are left with a realtion to the material nature of things in their isolated, urban existences and photographs which act as documents of those instances of experience which figure the generic and the intimate in and as a pluralist social space.

Howard Ursuliak was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and attended the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. He went on to receive his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia and now lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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