Large Scale Photomontage by ROSS C. KELLY
Art Beatus (Vancouver) Consultancy Ltd. is pleased to present EVERYTHING CONCEALS SOMETHING ELSE, an exhibition featuring large scale photomontage by Vancouver-based artist, ROSS C. KELLY. The snapshot is a particular kind of photographic record; a unique perspective captured in a moment of opportunity. Hundreds or even thousands of these singular moments are the artist's starting point, the elements with which he builds his thickly textured compositions. From panoramic skylines to narrow street views, Kelly's chosen sites, often in cities, are photographed repeatedly from a single vantage point over the course of several days or weeks, incorporating their many shifts in light, weather, and social use. The individual shots are then reduced in size and manually collaged together to create remarkably layered scenes. EVERYTHING CONCEALS SOMETHING ELSE opens Friday, July 20, 2012 starting at 3pm with a public reception – everyone is welcome - and Ross C. Kelly will be attending the event.
Kelly uses photomontage as a way to inject different moments, conditions and events into a static vista; he captures scenery that is physically realistic but which tries to reveal the complex and multilayered reality in a way that single shot photography or video cannot do. Cities are not seamless. Their inhabitants, architecture, even histories are made up of the co-existence of innumerable disparate parts, forced into association by a greater structural logic. While the individual frames that form Kelly's panoramas, shot from a great distance, appear to mesh as a coherent whole, the camera lens increasingly distorts its subject at ever-closer range, revealing disjunctions and gaps, which for the artist is a fitting metaphor of the reality of urban life. Kelly's works suggest there can never be a singular, stable image of the city. While each snapshot, like each individual viewpoint, exists as a discrete moment, our understanding of a particular place is always multiple, carrying with it the memory of other times, the knowledge of other spaces.
In conjunction with the exhibit at Art Beatus will be a public conceptual art project from July 12 to September 7, which, starting with Vancouver’s Stanley Park Seawall, involves Kelly inscribing temporary thin black lines of latitude, longitude and their numerical coordinates onto segments of the path, essentially converting the terrain into a 1:1 scale map. “My practice is concerned with how the idea of location often requires the interpretation of coordinates that are exterior to ourselves, how those coordinates shift, disappear and reappear constantly, how defining who we are, where we are and what our culture means is often possible only through positioning ourselves relative to other things and how and why this has never been more true than it is today.”
ROSS C. KELLY is from Dublin, Ireland. In 1996 he received his BA (Hons) in Behavioural Science from the American College Dublin, a Diploma in Photography from New York Institute of Photography in 2004, a Diploma in Professional Photography from Vancouver's Focal Point School of Photography also in 2004, and in 2010, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Art History from the University of British Columbia. Kelly's works have been exhibited both locally and internationally and he is the recipient of a number of awards.
EVERYTHING CONCEALS SOMETHING ELSE runs to Friday, September 14, 2012 at Art Beatus (Vancouver).
For more information, please visit our website at www.artbeatus.com or call the gallery at 1 (604) 688-2633.