Architectonic
From Sept. 16 to Sept. 20, Zavitz gallery held the exhibition Architectonic by Jazmyn Pettigrew. The exhibition illustrated a conversation between modern architecture and spatial and sculptural photography. Abstract folds were created within each photograph to negotiate the terrain between fiction and representation, illusion and abstraction. The exhibition invited the viewer to look deeper into the images as the works extended traditional photographs beyond their two-dimensional surfaces to provide the audience with a different experience of photography in art.
Each photograph is abstracted through folding, mirroring and cutting in order to visually alter the essence of time. Pettigrew used the elements that existed within architecture to create three-dimensional illustrations in photographs. They offered a natural presence and view to an image that is traditionally viewed as two-dimensional. The works came to life through the use of the folds, chosen by curvature and lines that already existed, to emphasize the positive and negative space.
When you entered the gallery space, you were faced with two images on the back wall. The image on the left represented a reference to architecture of buildings, where each fold was carefully made to distinctly separate each floor from one another. The image on the right, titled Waterfall, was a photograph of the outer infrastructure of the Guelph University’s water tower. In this image, Pettigrew re-emphasized the structure by creating folds in the areas where the metal was already folded.
The wall on the left held two untitled works, each placed distinctly in their position. On the corner of the wall, a photograph of the underside structure of an unfinished bridge laid on the floor with a mirror held against it. The image provided a strong presence of the mass and complex architecture involved in the design. The use of perspective elevated the relation of space and the structure. The image on the right side of the wall contained many folds and produced no particular clear image, but took the form of blinds in a mix of mediums such as sculpture and photography.
The image in the corner was a more extreme photographic piece of underneath a bridge, and here Pettigrew manipulated positive and negative folds. The shape progressed with each fold and allowed for the entire photograph to become more abstract. The other piece was subtler with a more elegant soft fold. The image content was a curved highway road covered in snow with a cold dark blue sky and fold in the bottom right corner that was symmetrical to the direction of the road – all in harmony with one another.
“I’ve always been drawn to large scale architecture and repetitive forms within architecture,” Said Pettigrew, “So I think it was that aesthetic appeal that I can see before taking the photograph and I wanted to manipulate the image that I had in my mind.”
Pettigrew will be continuing this exploration of the dialogue between modern architecture and spatial and sculptural photography throughout the upcoming semester.
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