MARK PECKMEZIAN at O’Born Contemporary (131 Ossington), to December 20. 416-413-9555. Rating: NNNN
Mark Peckmezian fills O’Born Contemporary with pensive, solemnly formalist photo portraits. Still deeply involved in the analog process in a digital world, the New York City-based Canadian photographer’s images radiate the still intensity of wet prints. The effect is both eerie and oddly satisfying.
That each print is of a dog is hardly the point. Peckmezian tests out the different techniques and conceits that photography, especially portrait photography, has deployed since its inception. He’s clearly invested in reviving the particular intensities and stylistic aesthetics of analog photography. Hence a silver gelatin print that brings out the severity of 1970s New York basement club photography, or a faded Chromogenic print of a white husky that’s worthy of Richard Prince. The dogs are red herrings.
By placing his subjects ever so slightly off kilter, Peckmezian demonstrates a flair for creating tension and an ability to lead the eye of the viewer. Close observation confirms his meticulous control, from the deep research behind each shot to the attention paid to sizing, framing and placement. You get the sense that he’s intensely investigating photography as a medium and a locus of ideas, and this gives the show a conceptual sheen.
A lot of ink has been spilled on photography’s supposed prosaic reliability as a faithful recorder of reality, and even more on the upsetting implications of digital photography’s falsifying wizardry. Peckmezian shows that photography has always perpetrated a radically subjective fiction. Film stock, lighting, placement, composition and exposure re-situate and change the content and impact of an image as much as any painterly decision.
In its virtuosic leaps from technique to technique, this is pure photography for photography’s sake.
art@nowtoronto.com
