The process of creating images through analog methods can be experimental, timely, and exciting – not unlike DIFTG’s growth over the past two years. To commemorate our anniversary, we’re showcasing a selection of Ottawa’s outstanding lens-based artists working in analog mediums, with emphasis on those who bend the rules and experiment with the medium. This occasion also marks our expansion into the realm of limited-edition photo books and zines, produced in-house to facilitate and guide the projects and artistic visions of emerging local photographers. If this past year has taught us anything, it’s that although the future is uncertain, our process will evolve with it.
The exhibition was up at Possible Worlds from March 12th to April 4th, and will remain here for one more month. These pieces can be found on our web shop by clicking the images themselves. Limited edition artist zines produced in celebration of our anniversary can be viewed here and purchased online through our web shop.
MaryAnn Camps
maryanncamps.com / @maryann.camps.artist
MaryAnn Camps is a Montreal-born, Ottawa-based visual artist. Following a career as a graphic designer, she began painting full time in 2005. Since 2016, her practice has had a photo-based focus. She has exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions. Her work is held in private collections in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and South America. She is represented by gallery Studio Sixty Six in Ottawa.
Camps is interested in urbanism, transitional spaces, and change. Exploring the interplay between people and urban space, she aims to infuse her work with a sense of transience and ambiguity. People and cities are in continual states of flux.
“How do our cities and urban environments affect how we think, feel, and behave? This question guided me during my one month residency in Montreal in Fall 2019. To explore the concept that cities and people are systems which continually interact with each other, I walked through Montreal’s neighbourhoods with my camera to absorb and process the people and places I saw. I best observed the interplay between people and public space on the Metro transit system as they navigated their days. These locations also tied into my ongoing interests in transient spaces and change.
Post-residency, I began to investigate the concept of embodied cognition: how we perceive the world around us with all of our senses, as well as through movement, and how we process that information, both consciously and nonconsciously. This concept resonated with me and informed a way to express what I had perceived and felt as I absorbed the city.
Back in Ottawa, I worked with a combination of analog and digital processes: I made ink drawings on sheets of polyester film and digitally combined these with photographic images. This effectively added a layer of light, shadow and texture with the goal of integrated, expressive and intensified images. I then produced monoprints on matte polyester film using an acrylic medium transfer process, resulting in transparent images on translucent film. I enjoyed the push and pull between control of the process and surrender to the imperfections that inevitably happen. These marks are integral to the work and, combined with the transparency of the work, contribute to a sense of transience and ambiguity.”
Nicolai Gregory
nicolaigregory.com / @nicolaipgregory
Nicolai Gregory is an Ottawa-based photographer. He began shooting street photography, which led him to apply at The School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa. His time at SPAO expanded his interest in analog photography and introduced him to the darkroom, where he fell in love with the art of printing. During his last year of the program, he was brought into the world of commercial photography under the expert wing of Remi Theriault. Using his previous darkroom experience, Nicolai played a role as an instructor in Do It For The Grain’s 2019/2020 pop-up darkroom workshop series. Despite working commercially, full-time and also starting his own Fine Art printing business out of House Of Common Studio, Nicolai has still found time to work on various photographic projects. Since 2020, he has produced major bodies of work, such as the 300-person portrait project “Family Friends and Strangers,” as well as continued to work on other personal projects.
Sandra Hawkins
sandrahawkins.ca
Sandra Hawkins is a multimedia visual artist based in Ottawa. Her work contributes to climate change discussions and impacts on our identity in relation to changing cultural and geographic ecologies. The Arctic Crisis series of digital photomontage prints are reinventions of her 1980’s photographs while working in arctic communities along the Northwest Passage. She digitally combines these original scanned prints with her digitized New York City street photographs. Her message is with the melting of the Arctic a major global economic centre such as New York City is vulnerable to flooding by its geographic coastal and elevation location.
Her research practice synthesizes the scientific data and her first-hand observations of Arctic land-based ice melting during her ongoing creative research in the Canadian and International Arctic Territories. Her artistic intent is for her art to transcend facts and to create resonating spaces. Her work is concerned with the fluidity of place identity.
Hawkins’ Arctic Crisis Series of prints (30) has shown to critical acclaim locally, across Canada and at important international exhibitions and festivals.
Hawkins received her BFA, magna cum laude from University of Ottawa in 1999, having previously completed the MES, Masters in Environmental Studies, at York University Toronto and post-graduate studies in Sociology of history and culture at Carleton University. Artist Residencies include Banff Centre in Photography, Arctic Return Canada, Arctic Circle 2019 Arts & Sciences Expedition Svalbard and many others. Among her awards and recognitions, are several Ontario Art Council Exhibitions grants, the ArtTour International Top 60 Contemporary Artists, the K. M. Hunter Award Nominee by Ontario Art Council & Ontario Arts Foundation, and Premier’s Award in Creative Arts Nominee, St. Lawrence College Ontario.
Olivia Johnston
oliviajohnston.com / @olijohn
Olivia Johnston is a lens-based artist whose work probes gender, beauty, the body, art history, self-portraiture, and the nature of the photographic image.
Recent exhibitions include Saints and Madonnas at the Carleton University Art Gallery (2019), CONTINUUM: a New Generation at the Karsh-Masson Gallery, (2017) and I May Be Crazy But Not That Crazy at the CONTACT Photography Festival (2017). Recent honours include the RBC Emerging Artist Award (2019), the 2019 Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward program (2019) and Grand Prize Winner of the Figureworks exhibition (2018); she was shortlisted for the New Generation Photography Award in 2018 and 2020. Johnston holds a B.A. Honours in Art History and is the Operations Manager and an instructor at the SPAO Centre in Ottawa.
“Humans travel for various reasons: work, pleasure, exploration, escape. The photographing of these adventures seems obligatory, but at times pointless. Why create another photograph in a world saturated with them? The camera seems to be the perfect tool with which to capture the world, a “device that makes real what one is experiencing.” And yet the photograph is faulty in its depiction of reality, transforming experience into a subject frozen in time. How, then, might one authentically represent the world using the photographic medium? Is it possible? I contemplate these questions, and yet I continue to make photographs.
The Holga, in its simplicity and its use of the analogue process, allows me a kind of meditation upon the creation of the image, a heartbeat of reverence for both the scene being photographed and the moment in which I am existing and photographing. In this way, images that come from my Holga orient my memories rather than replace them; they are waymarkers on my travels.
René Magritte, the master Surrealist painter, said, “we see [the world] as being outside ourselves, even though it is only a mental representation of what we experience on the inside.” Here, the travel photograph begins to represent more than just a single photographic moment: I create a complex, layered and at times strange depiction of reality, one that comes closer to reflecting memories of my experience, even perhaps revealing my psyche.”
Alexia-Leana Kokozaki
alexiakokozaki.com / @alexiakkzki
Alexia-Leana Kokozaki is a Canadian-Cypriot artist based in the Ottawa-Gatineau region. She completed her BFA at the University of Ottawa in 2017 and obtained her Masters of Art History at Carleton University in 2019. A recipient of both the 2017 Edmund and Isobel Ryan 1st Prize in Photography as well as a winner of the 2016 AIMIA | AGO Prize Scholarship, her practice primarily involves photography and installation, but also branches into painting and video. Her artistic endeavors originate from an internal framework of incessant questioning that she seeks to rationalize within her work.
“The purpose of this project was to capture the likeness of a person without seeing their face. I wanted to paint an unconventional portrait of subjects by having audiences consider and analyze their clothing, their posture or general demeanor instead of their facial expressions. In terms of process, the subjects were invited to a photography studio and were asked to sit facing the backdrop. Each session lasted approximately ten minutes and the people photographed were not told when their picture would be taken.”
Ava Margueritte
avamargueritte.format.com / @avamargueritte
Ava Margueritte is a neurodiverse multidisciplinary artist, primarily focused on photo-based works and drawing, painting, and writing. Margueritte has a BFA from OCAD University in Fine Arts Photography and a Diploma from School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa. Using various photographic mediums including, but not limited to, medium format, large format film, and digital, she explores different narratives to document physical reactions to other emotional states. By absorbing her surroundings, she evaluates the connection between body and mind. Drawing from several different mediums to execute her narrative, and is inspired by other multidisciplinary artists such as Egon Schiele, Wes Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Irving Penn, Tim Walker, and Suzy Lake. Margueritte has shown nationally, internationally and her work is in the collection of several personal collectors.
“Romantics examines a stagnant period of my life, I was trying to hold on to things that weren’t really mine, and memories that were eventually going to be lost. I was in limbo from who I was before but also not quite who I wanted to be. In my photographs, I tend to create alternate worlds that I can exist in. These worlds are often clean and geometric, being neurodiverse I find myself simplifying things around me, turning things that are overwhelming and chaotic into something aesthetically pleasing.”
Maxine S
@mirage.atrois
Maxine S is a 24-year-old French-Filipina photographer born in Manila. The Ottawa-Gatineau region has been her home for the past 7 years. She is a self-taught artist, initiated into film photography as a child when she was gifted with a disposable camera. In 2018 she branched away from disposables and introduced her analog photography to the public.
Notably, her work has been shared to the public through RAW Ottawa’s “Connect Showcase” exhibition at the Saint Bridgid’s Centre for the Arts (July 2018), a two-part feature on Do It For the Grain’s Instagram page (September 2020), an appearance in Aeonian Magazine’s issue no.3 which celebrates experimental and alternative photography (January 2021), print sales and private photoshoots.
Through photographic imagery, Maxine aims to channel the creativity and experience of living with depression and ADHD, while still indulging in the thrills of youth. Overall, her process projects those emotions by focusing on abstract, dreamy, and piercing dark tones. The emphasis on cool hues as well as experimental manipulations convey disturbance, restlessness, and fantasy. Her approach is fueled by fun and light debauchery, and she often captures the enthralling energy of party settings. Additionally, her vision aims to normalize sensual expression, queer people’s autonomy over their narrative, and women’s leadership over their femininity. In essence, Maxine hopes to evoke an emotional response in individuals, be it peaceful or vivid. Currently, her work ventures into 3D photography, alternative techniques and home developing.
Nevertheless, Maxine’s creative exploration is still at its early stage, as she slowly puzzles together her visual thoughts for the audience to witness. Ultimately, she sees photography as an energy release and intends on pushing her projects further with more psychedelic layers. The hands-on process of learning alternative methods keeps the excitement alive.
“The aim for “My Love Affair With Everywhere” was to show how summer feels to me. First, the waves of colour distortion capture the effervescence of summer, while the blue and purple undertones emanate the nostalgia of the season coming to an end. The chemical damage moulds patterns reminiscent of wind to illustrate the volatility of summer air and emotions. The reds and oranges narrate the brief, sultry heat and make the observer feel like they are floating through mist. The vibrant strokes of colour make you feel alive: it’s summer, it’s drugs, it’s fleeting passions and lovers. Incidentally, the breeze and waves are also a projection of serenity. A drowsy afternoon nap. Finally, the series is centered around flowers to emphasize nature as a constant through the chaos, as well as a wink to my femininity.”
We would like to acknowledge funding support for this exhibition from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
