01 avril 2011

« Capturing Beauty’s ‘As Is' », Shawn Katz, Rover Arts Magazine.

Capturing Beauty’s “As Is”

Face aux murs, Peggy Faye, Galérie Mezz’art

There is an interesting paradox at play in the photographs of Peggy Faye. On the one hand, we find in her work a sense of quotidian simplicity and everyday beauty that can only really exist in the field of photography. Yet on the other, we see in her colour compositions elements of such careful balance – and planes of such vibrant lustre – that they seem born of a painter’s palette.

Flowing from her last show, Photographes, presented earlier this year, her latest exhibition at Mezz’art,Face aux murs, is every bit as raw and subtle as the first, though with an added sense of cohesion.

Seeing Faye’s work is a comforting delight that feels almost like returning to visit an old friend. Like that wise old soul who comes to calm and ground you, she’s there just to remind you of the things you always knew. “Stop straining your eyes to fill the frame with such lofty imaginings,” the friend might say, “just open them, and look: everything you could ever want to see is already there.”

Distilled to an essence, Faye’s magic is in her eye for seeing beauty precisely where it is, free of the need to mold or manipulate it to the artist’s passions. It’s in the richness of the copper tones of a worn out rusted grate, as its crooked mesh shadow is cast against the concrete wall behind it; in the luminous teal mosaic made from mere peeling paint, as it tears gently away from the whitewashed surface beneath. It is there – if only you’ll remember not to forget – in the earth’s own works of art.

In addition to the simple subjects of her photos, the potency of Faye’s images rests in the honesty of her appeal, and her approach. Walls, windows and doors often fill the frame and are always captured head on, without angling or obstructions. They are examined from so close up as to emphasize but the fundamental geometry of the image – the planes, the lines, the colours, the forms – and to erase all sense of setting in the process. That too, though, is precisely the point. The lack of any discernible cultural or geographic context in her work is, ultimately, the context she seeks. Simply put, the fact that we can’t tell the difference between the photos taken in Tokyo and those of a Plateau alleyway speaks to the very heart of Faye’s vision, namely the universality of the human experience.

At the end of one of her exhibitions, you can’t help but come away with a wistful wave of admiration, if not outright envy. To see the world through Faye’s eyes, after all, is to spend every waking moment enamoured by the common canvases found around every corner, lusting for the sights that surround us every day, and at home in every corner of the world.

Peggy Faye’s Face aux murs is on exhibition at Galérie Mezz’art until April 17, 2011.

By Suzanne Gardner

Applied Arts is pleased to announce the winners of our 2011 Photography & Illustration Awards!

The winning work represents some of the very best produced in North America and abroad over the past year. New this year was the addition of the popular Young Bloods category, intended for young creatives who have been out of school for three years or less. The Young Blood winners will receive the same great exposure as all of our awards entries, with the added bonus of editorial coverage in a future issue of Applied Arts for the highest scoring entry in both Photography and Illustration. This year that special honour goes to Matthew Liteplo in the Photography category and Cate Francis in the Illustration Category.

All winning work will be showcased in the May/June 2011 issue of the magazine, the Winners Gallery on our website and at our annual Winners Exhibit, which we’re happy to announce will be held on Wednesday, October 26 and Thursday, October 27, 2011 atArtscape Wychwood Barns in Toronto. You can view photos of our fantastic 2010 event on our Flickr or Facebook pages.

The full list of winners appears below. Congratulations to all of the winners!

Young Blood Winners

The Poetry of the Banal

Peggy Faye, Photographies, L’espace contemporain

There is nothing groundbreaking in the photography of Peggy Faye. There is no visual trickery, no Photoshop wizardry, no mixed media or medium-melding avant-gardisme to speak of. And the beauty imparted by the simple subjects is that much purer for it. And that much more enduring.

Faye’s exhibition, Photographies, is as simple in aim as in title: to return a sense of poetry to the everyday. It is the fine art of photography distilled down to its essence, and Faye’s work succeeds in reminding us of everything that is most powerful in the medium.

The images unfolding before us depict a sequence of familiar scenes: people waiting for the metro in Paris or Tokyo; a woman strolling, pensive, through an alleyway in Seoul; a man resting on the curb outside his restaurant, his head in the clouds, and smoking a cigarette; a group of youths, sun-soaked and tattooed, hanging around their cars in a yard in Verdun; an array of shoddy doorways and window frames, darkened lanes and graffiti tags, in nameless streets and back alleys from Montreal to Japan, France to Korea.

Each or any one could be your neighbourhood back lane. Each or any your metro platform. Or even you. It is this universality of the human experience which inspires Faye’s work, and which weaves one seemingly random scene to the next. Yet these isolated fragments of the mundane serve a far greater purpose than merely uniting us across diverse cultures. Faye has captured the banal in the everyday, has framed it, distanced it, and then held it up to the viewer’s glare. Staring back at us we see our own inglorious existences, our own faded everyday. And there is poetry there.

This, perhaps, is the singular magic of photography, and Faye’s series serves as evocation. It brings art down to earth from the abstract, and in the process helps elevate the earth — the mundane, the banal, the everyday — to the realm of art. In this way, it is maybe the only visual art form, if not the only art form at all, which can truly claim to be the bridge between the artist’s imaginary and the real. And therein lays its special, almost guttural, force.

It is frequently said that photography is “painting with light.” A more accurate description, however, jumps to mind when viewing Faye’s images: the world itself is the photographer’s palette, their sight the first stroke of the brush.

If this is true, of course, then we are all artists inside, or can be. We only have to learn to see.