Exhalation/Transmissions, Passages Botaniques
Dianne Bos: back to Artist
Artist Statement
In this new body of work Bos uses analog photographic processes to explore contrasts and echoes between the designed worlds of botanical gardens, biodiversity gardens and the natural environment. The use of low tech photographic technologies prevents this from becoming a strictly documentary project, since these techniques heighten the dreamlike, magical or even chimerical quality of the work, sometimes seeming to make the invisible visible.
In this new body of work Bos uses analog photographic processes to explore contrasts and echoes between the designed worlds of botanical gardens, biodiversity gardens and the natural environment. The use of low tech photographic technologies prevents this from becoming a strictly documentary project, since these techniques heighten the dreamlike, magical or even chimerical quality of the work, sometimes seeming to make the invisible visible.
Plant processes such as exhalation, transmission, photosynthesis, regeneration and decomposition cross boundaries between the human and the non-human, just as plants and gardens negotiate frontiers between the natural and the cultural or artistic. It is timely to investigate how we represent human separation from, and inclusion in, nature. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and now global pandemics are familiar parts of today’s lexicon, highlighting how some aspects of the natural world have already existed within “the anthropocene” for a long time.
In pinhole photography, light passes through a tiny aperture to alter the chemistry of photo paper or film, much as light triggers photosynthesis in plants. Long exposures record a passage of time. By using objects and the photogram technique in the darkroom, I add a poetic dimension to the resulting images, making visible ordinarily invisible transactions such as exhalation, transmission, photosynthesis, and regeneration between the human and natural worlds.
In pinhole photography, light passes through a tiny aperture to alter the chemistry of photo paper or film, much as light triggers photosynthesis in plants. Long exposures record a passage of time. By using objects and the photogram technique in the darkroom, I add a poetic dimension to the resulting images, making visible ordinarily invisible transactions such as exhalation, transmission, photosynthesis, and regeneration between the human and natural worlds.
Artist Biography
Dianne Bos has been exhibiting her photo based work for over 40 years. She has evolved various thematic bodies of work, and merged technical innovations to create new visual hybrids: her innovative uses of pinhole, film, camera obscura, photogram, installation, and cyanotype all explore the world around us.
‘The excitement, for me, lies not in photographing and reproducing something I can see, but in revealing the imperceptible (and maybe only the imagined) using the physics of light and time and traditional darkroom techniques.’
Bos has been the recipient of many awards and grants and has also been nominated twice for the Scotia Bank Photography Award.
Her work has been presented internationally and she is a sought after presenter on alternative photography techniques. Her work is represented in many private and public collections including The National Gallery of Canada, Glenbow Museum, Art Gallery of Hamilton, The McMaster Museum of Art.
Pricing
18 x 18 inches
Edition of 3, 1AP
$2,200.00
30 x 30 inches
Edition of 3, 1AP
$3,000.00