The White Rock-based Praxis Photography Collective has come a long way in less than a year.
Started last March, it has seen an extended run (continuing through November) for its first show The Launch, at the waterfront office of Hamish Ross of Macdonald Realty (14869 Marine Dr.).
Ross – son of collective member Linda Bickerton-Ross – has since offered his office gallery as a permanent exhibition space for the group (an open house will be held there this Sunday, Nov. 26, from 1 to 4 p.m.).
And 2024 is shaping up as a good year, with the collective being invited to participate in the January exhibition at the Landmark Pop-Uptown Gallery at Central Plaza, More Than The Eye Can See, as well as securing its own show, Inside Out, at the same gallery, in August.
READ ALSO: White Rock exhibit to celebrate art of photography
The medieval Latin word praxis, from Greco-Roman origins, refers to a balance between practice and theory – and it’s evident all five members of the collective share a common concern for pragmatic action to achieve their artistic vision, as well as a desire to learn from and stimulate each other’s creativity, and innovation, in a process that also benefits from community feedback.
Fortunately, the reaction to their first show, which opened in September, was positive – giving ample evidence that the public is willing to support photography that, more than being merely representational, is a function of an artistic aesthetic.
The continuing show at Macdonald Realty illustrates that the five members of the collective, Barbara Cooper, Gary Kennedy, Jan Lyle, George Omorean and Bickerton-Ross, while sharing similar overall aims, are markedly different artistic personalities.
Cooper – a long-time supporter of the arts on the Peninsula, who served for many years on the board of Semiahmoo Arts, and art and culture advisory committees for White Rock and Surrey – has since combined her love for travel with her fondness and sensitivity for architecture, culture and nature.
Her work in the show, rather than celebrating broad vistas, delves into intriguing corners of alleys and streets, where graffiti and successive layers of postering, stripped away by the elements and continuing human intervention, can produce odd, stimulating juxtapositions of image and colourful wall textures.
“Most of the photographs I’m showing are representations of a trip I took a year ago to Italy,” she said, pointing out the colour and texture of walls she zeroed-in on in Rome, as well as another wall in Milan in which a decaying, and dominant vintage image of movie actress Hedy Lamarr has become the focus for improvisational graffiti.
On trips like that “you’re really spoiled for choice” in finding arresting compositions, Cooper said.
“You take it all, and afterwards you choose what’s most appealing.”
Kennedy, also fond of travel and nature, is a member of the Public Art and Cultural Advisory Committee for the City of White Rock. Also a keen encaustic artist – combining a hot wax medium with pigments to create abstracted, textural imagery, he has explored the combination of encaustic technique with photographic imagery, resulting in work currently on display in the Surrey Central Civic Hotel.
“I do a lot of local photography,” Kennedy said, noting that he makes use of macro zoom to find elements in a scene – such as cabbage leaves in the community garden in Crescent Beach, or metal joints under the trestle train bridge in East Beach, that can become abstract images that have their own intrinsic beauty.
“I like the idea of the ordinary becoming the extraordinary,” he said.
Jan Lyle has become a master of the most recent development in photographic history – the cellphone. While others may decry the prevalence of such instant imagery in popular culture, Lyle – who began her exploration of photography in March of 2020 by taking whatever struck her eye during long walks during the COVID lockdown – demonstrates that, in art, it’s not the medium, but what you do with it, that counts.
“It’s all new to me,” she said, adding that while, at first, she didn’t believe her work was of the calibre of the other photographers, she has come to trust her instincts in finding new and unusual images in what she sees about her – including light filtering through her husbands glassware collection, or patterns soap made, while she was cleaning a glass-top kitchen stove.
“At this point in my life I’ve developed an eye,” she acknowledged. “But with me, photography is a very straightforward process. I point and shoot. There’s no Photoshop; all I do is crop.”
Fine art photographer George Omorean, as well as using his own photographer’s eye to uncover intriguing aspects of the real world, has also explored many alternatives to conventional film process, including digital and camera-less photography, to create more abstract work.
“Intrigued by what the inside of a digital camera looks like, I dissected one and exposed its innards,” he said of his vividly-coloured works, Digital Spectrum, on display at the gallery.
“The images presented are abstractions based on extreme macros (close-ups) of the internal composition of a digital camera,” he added.
“The abstract effects in these photographs were produced by applying a series of digital algorithms that magnified the wavelength, amplitude and frequency of the images… (they) offer a representation of how light waves would appear, if we could see them travelling from an object to the eyes of a viewer.”
Bickerton-Ross describes herself as a “fine-art photographer with occasional forays into street and documentary photography.”
Her two-year digital documentary project, The Birthing of a High Rise, focused on the construction of the second phase of White Rock’s Miramar development, and was co-sponsored by the ArtsCan Resource Network, Canada Council and the City of Surrey, while her photo of a rain-distorted lower Johnston Road, Small City Blues won first prize in the photography category of the Arts 2023 exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery.
She notes that her work lately has concentrated on the sometimes surreal juxtaposition of the natural world and the construction that is transforming it.
Her photos Solastalgia 1 and 2 reflect the security and love she feels in her home town – “yet also awareness I feel about current and upcoming changes to my home, and within my community and the world,” she said.
“I’m mainly interested in abstract photography,” she said. “It’s always interested me, but I’ve grown more skilled in the variety of ways I can do it.”
For opening hours of Macdonald Realty, call 604-376-7687.