Nearness To or Distance From

Laura Dutton

November 2 to December 1, 2018

Nearness To or Distance From consists of a series of abstracted, candid portraits of tourists visiting the Grand Canyon. These individuals were standing about a kilometre away on an adjacent cliff, unaware that their imprint—however ghostly and lacking in detail—was making its way into my camera. In post production, I zoomed into the vast iconic landscape in my pictures and plucked out the tiny portions of captured information describing these humans. Through a process of printing, scanning and reprinting, the results reveal an ink dot pattern that is reminiscent of pointillism. It’s as if these people could have been stolen from the background of a Seurat painting, where they had been forgotten.

These spectres prompt us to think about our mark in the world, our presence, even when insignificant and unseen. The process of looking at this work is a meditation on the act of seeing and the difficulty of knowing what it is we see.

Laura Dutton is a Victoria-based visual artist working primarily with video installation and photography. She holds a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, Montreal (2006) and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria (2011) where she currently teaches. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, most recently at Esker Foundation Project Space in Calgary, as well as the Legacy Gallery in Victoria, PAVED Arts in Saskatoon, VU Photo in Quebec City, and as part of the emerging artists exhibition Ensuing Pictures which kicked off the inaugural year of the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver. She has been the recipient of two Canada Council for the Arts Project Grants (2013, 2015), a BC Arts Council Project Grant (2012), the Canwest Global Scholarship in Film and Video (2010) and represented Quebec in the 2006 BMO First Art nationwide competition.