Banff National Park Gallery of Fine Art and Photography
|
|
  |
| |
Bill Peters |
||
Works from the When the City Isn't Looking Series |
||
 |
||
| Frank Gehry Surface #1, Seattle | ||
| archival color pigment print | ||
| 20x30", framed with conservation clear UV glass | ||
$975.00 CDN
|
||
 |
||
| Window Washer, Calgary | ||
| archival color pigment print | ||
| 20x30", framed with conservation clear UV glass | ||
$975.00 CDN
|
||
 |
||
| 333 - 5th Avenue SW, Calgary | ||
| archival color pigment print | ||
| 20x30", framed with conservation clear UV glass | ||
$975.00 CDN
|
||
 |
||
| Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto | ||
| archival color pigment print | ||
| 23x35", framed with conservation clear UV glass | ||
$1175.00 CDN
|
||
Biography and Artist's Statement |
||
When the City Isn’t Looking While I’ve photographed for many years, I never began to fully understand photography as an expressive medium until I began to understand painting. On this journey of understanding, the words of Georgia O’Keefe struck with particular force, “Nothing is less real than realism… it is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” But are painting and photography just about the “meaning of things”? I think not and wish O’Keefe had stopped and placed her period after the word “meaning.” Long fascinated by the landscape, urban and natural, I’ve been sensitive to the work of the new topographers, like Robert Adams, though I find this work infused with a dreary pessimism which I deeply appreciate but can’t share. So I spent over a decade from the mid 1990s until 2006 trying to see the land and the city in a way that was, for me, emotionally true. In mid-2006 I began to experiment with images that were just fragments of an entire scene, sometimes highly abstracted in terms of colour, reflection, layering and sharpness. Suddenly I was excited and at the same time dismayed; the work so dramatically superseded in emotional truth anything in the thousands and thousands of negatives I’d made before. I’m dismayed I may never print these negatives again. My cities work is coming together in a growing body under the title “When the City Isn’t Looking”. The first 16 images in this series were the subject of a one-person show at the Gallery of Photographic Arts – Canada, in Calgary’s Art Central in November of 2008. Bringing this work together was a real breakthrough, freeing me of the pessimism of the new topographers and freeing me to work in an intuitive, highly abstract manner. My city is a very human city – intuited in the personification of the title. Perhaps the work can best be characterized as a dialogue between a newer, more optimistic urban topographic and a sensibility of light, colour, space and texture that treats the city itself as abstract art. The images in When the City Isn’t Looking are all “straight” photographs in the sense that no elements are added or combined. Only ordinary controls like contrast, saturation, dodging and burning have been applied. I print each image individually as an artist’s print in an open, lifetime limited edition. The image as object has become artistically important to me; therefore each image is mounted, matted and framed to a high standard.
|
||
Biography - Bill Peters is a photographic artist based in Calgary, Canada. Peters journey to become a visual artist followed a circuitous route. As a young man he contemplated a career in the photographic arts but instead opted to study Astronomy at the University of Sothern California. Peters says, “I was passionate about understanding the universe and felt this path provided a great creative outlet plus it appealed to my technical and scientific inclinations.” In addition to the sciences, Peters studied film and photography at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and followed his science degree with an M.A. in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the University of Toronto. During the 1980s, Peters combined his interests in the visual arts with science by writing, directing or producing fifteen major productions for planetariums at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Manitoba Museum. This was a creatively satisfying period; however, Peters recalls, “I saw how planetariums and museums were not reaching their potential and I began successfully raising funds to for new initiatives to strongly engage the community. The momentum of this work led me into senior leadership, culminating as President and CEO of the TELUS World of Science – Calgary and Chief Project Officer for the new science centre in Calgary.” In Calgary, Peters led a series of projects which tripled the attendance of TELUS World of Science - Calgary. Then he developed the vision and the fund raising to build a new science centre. Peters notes, “When I left the organization in October, 2008, I had obtained a site for the new centre and the major funding was secured or pending. I’m especially pleased I was able to partner with the Creative Kids Museum Society to build that museum as Calgary’s project celebrating Alberta’s Centennial. At first people were puzzled, wondering, ‘What’s the science centre doing building an Arts based children’s museum?’ When they saw the Creative Kids Museum in action they said, ‘Now I get it – I see the intimate creative relationship between the arts and the sciences.’” “While leading a major museum was challenging and satisfying in terms of the results achieved, during the 1990s the work became less fulfilling in a personal creative sense. I began setting aside time each year to return to my roots in expressive, fine art photography. This was really essential to my soul and sustained me during intense years of planning, building, fund raising and more. Even my creative contributions to the museum field did not sustain me in the same way.” Since becoming a full-time visual artist in 2008 Peters has been encouraged by the reception his work has received and surprised by the artistic breakthroughs he has made. He has transitioned from working primarily in black and white to making large, intensely coloured, sometimes highly abstract images. Peters says, “The images have become metaphors for what I feel for the city, the land, the future. I’m excited to see where exploring these metaphors will lead.”
|
||
Education Exhibitions 2009 |
|
©Willock and Sax Ltd. Gallery 1999-2008. All
rights reserved |