Staring Into Fog

Laura Dutton

April 28 to May 27, 2023

Canadian artist Laura Dutton has long been interested in making photo-based work untethered from referents. This approach has allowed her the exploration, study and documentation of the ineffable while illuminating the materiality of the photo itself. Staring Into Fog arose from a trip to St. John’s, Newfoundland where the artist experienced an extreme example of this natural weather phenomenon from Signal Hill, leading her to embrace it as a subject that both conceals and reveals. This is Dutton’s second solo exhibition with Deluge Contemporary after Nearness To or Distance From in 2018 and includes photographs and moving image.

Laura Dutton is a photo/video-based artist and an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria. She received an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2011 and a BFA (Hons.) from Concordia University, Montréal in 2006.

Dutton works with photography and video installation to unravel the materiality of photographic images and disrupt our ability to look straight through to the referent described. By obscuring, degrading or removing the subject matter altogether, her images reveal their own process and become distilled suggestions of what once stood before the lens, offering an epistemological space for the viewer to meditate on the act of seeing and knowing.

Recent solo exhibitions include The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna), Deluge Contemporary (Victoria), Esker Foundation Project Space (Calgary), PAVED Arts (Saskatoon), VU Photo (Québec City) and group exhibitions at Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Jones (Vancouver), Chernoff Fine Art (Vancouver) and Open Space (Victoria). She was included in the opening exhibition for the inaugural year of the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver and was the Québec winner of the 2006 BMO First Art competition. She has received project grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council. Her work is included in collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Bank of Montreal and the University of the Fraser Valley.