Artist Statement For 401 Richmond

I like taking Polaroids.  I like how they saturate colour, so
everything becomes so bright, strange, and pure—the grass greens, the
sky blues, the red of billboards, the yellow o jonquils. It is like a
strange world where everything is submerged in a super perfect world
of ideal colour, it almost hurts ones eyes, all subtlety is lost, but
when you go around and hope for subtlety, you miss things. It forces
ones eyes back to things ignored, it almost makes a platonic ideal of
it.

I like taking Polaroids because they can form something quotidian.
Other people have done this, the filmmaker John Waters and the
photographer Ryan McGinley both take a Polaroid of anyone who walks
into their residences. I do not doing anything so conceptual—but by
carrying a camera around, one records the basic ebb and flow of every
day life. Everything that one encounters become an aesthetic concern.

One can do this in other ways, mostly through digital cameras and
camera phones. Everyone is making daily encounters an aesthetic
concern, with the popularization of flickr accounts, the ease of
exchanging digital images, etc. Why do this one kind of camera in one
kind of way, is a love of film somewhat reactionary? There is
something to the craft, and the richness of 35 mm film, and so that
will last longer then anything else, but there is no craft or skill in
Polaroids. It is just point and click, even then, you cannot play with
lenses, or figure out what the best way of lighting is—thee is
something to that though. Taking a tool to specially limit you,
figuring out how to take the best images through limited means
sharpens a critical eye. Knowing how to photograph with a camera that
can only take from three feet away, in limited light, under certain
circumstances, and that you cannot Photoshop the images afterwards,
gives a sot of Zen feeling, waiting for the weather to change or
wandering looking for the right places, instead of planning it.
Patience is rewarded.

Often the object itself rewards the patience. It is strange to think
of something so immediate (30 seconds or less) would make people
patient. There is something to the cult of object. Something tenuous
and almost erotic in the unveiling of the image (Poloraids are often
used as porn because they are discreet objects created almost ex
nihllo, but that waiting for the image, the dropping of blackness and
the emerging of light, and having a small square to carry around in
your pocket, of place and time, and 25 years later having the image
drop off again.  The Polaroid forever maintains its cult of
objecthood, in its own qualities, with out the intercession of
technological intervention, or digital tasks.  The photos of landscape
then, sent back to Ontario from Alberta, are tactile and visceral
reminders of landscape. Think of them as extensions of the diptychs
travelers carried, of home saints or small landscapes, throughout
European history, or the aesthetics of mogul mintutures in India, or
figures of Shinto saints that kept obis connected for Japanese
Samurais. However, think of those things made by a small machine that
perpetuates images with minor human interventions.