Joan Kaufman's work embodies aspects of sculpture, theatre, photography, and digital media. She works in series producing large format B/W photo-based images that blur the boundaries between illusion and reality. By creating constructed realities within theatre-like settings, her images are experienced as moments suspended in a larger unfolding narrative.
Her current exhibition, Sure Sign, explores the fragile yet steadfast nature of human beings living in a new and dangerous world. Responding to threats in primitive and makeshift ways, their actions are a metaphor both for the individual caught in a personally precarious situation and a cautionary tale for the larger world that we live in.
A Toronto-based artist, Kaufman has exhibited both nationally and internationally in public and artist-run galleries; is the recipient of Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and Manitoba Arts Council grants; and has works in both public and private collections.
Red Head Gallery 401 Richmond St. W. Ste 115, Toronto www.joankaufman.com for more information.
The goal of the body of work entitled Interior Landscape is to open a space for the viewer to experience an external, familiar landscape in an altered way-letting the eye tap into both a real world view and a personal, inner terrain.
Beginning my career as an abstract painter, I progressively moved towards abstraction in my photography. In exploring different ways to photograph the landscape, I intuitively approached the work from a painter's point of view while abstractly composing in camera. My goal was to create visual tension while leveraging natural distortions within my compositions. The distortions act as a filter-allowing the viewer the choice of what to focus on-both internally and externally.
By using the natural distortions present in our every day world-moisture on windows, swirling smoke, rising walls of mist-I transform the landscape into an unfamiliar world of concealment and uncertainty. This transformation evokes a painterly quality, while still retaining a connection to the realism inherent in photography. While focusing on the most minute details of these natural distortions, we generate a space for quiet contemplation-breaking old, rigid view patterns and allowing for a new external and internal vision to occur.
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