April 2012
La Petite Mort Gallery presents
Osheen Harruthoonyan
‘Black Garden’ Series (Photography)
April 6 – 29, 2012
Vernissage Friday April 6 / 7 – 10pm
Statement:
“It’s easy to lose sight of exactly who you are while passing through the ‘Black Garden’. At the start, things are clear, there’s you and there’s the land, you each have your names and the division is simple.
Yet even from a peak within Nagorno-Karabakh you’re lost in the panorama. Mountain after mountain begets valley upon valley. A singular road runs through it all and though the end is too far to make out, you trust there’s an end. In your immediate vicinity at any given time you lose yourself in the intimacy of the trees, the overgrown foliage, the tombstones of an abandoned graveyard like fossilised crevices disintegrating in the wind. Voices buried beneath the moss, and cumulative silence, whisper about war.
There are small signs of life, a singular bird, a crucifix like a question mark that would cease to be seen if not for a blinking flame between the dripping walls of a crumbling cave. As night falls, shadows cannot be deciphered from leaves. Something floats by your eye, mouches volontes, a schism in the visual fabric, produced by your mind or the air, it does not matter. Your heart beats out what colour is left of the fading day and at once you are included and excluded from the landscape…” – Amy Pagnotta
::
Yet even from a peak within Nagorno-Karabakh you’re lost in the panorama. Mountain after mountain begets valley upon valley. A singular road runs through it all and though the end is too far to make out, you trust there’s an end. In your immediate vicinity at any given time you lose yourself in the intimacy of the trees, the overgrown foliage, the tombstones of an abandoned graveyard like fossilised crevices disintegrating in the wind. Voices buried beneath the moss, and cumulative silence, whisper about war.
There are small signs of life, a singular bird, a crucifix like a question mark that would cease to be seen if not for a blinking flame between the dripping walls of a crumbling cave. As night falls, shadows cannot be deciphered from leaves. Something floats by your eye, mouches volontes, a schism in the visual fabric, produced by your mind or the air, it does not matter. Your heart beats out what colour is left of the fading day and at once you are included and excluded from the landscape…” – Amy Pagnotta
::
Born in Persia and raised in Athens, Greece and Vancouver B.C., Osheen Harruthoonyan is a Toronto based photographer and filmmaker. Drawing upon his rich experiences living in such diverse cities, he employs a multi-faceted approach towards his artistic practice, investigating memory, history and the deconstructive process of time. Osheen’s work has been featured on Bravo! Arts Channel and his exhibitions in Toronto have consistently been noted as a top show not to miss. Harruthoonyan has also worked as a cinematographer on numerous short films, music videos, and experimental films.
Osheen Harruthoonyan’s sumptuous photographic prints evoke the uncertain, fledgling flashes encountered at the threshold of a dream. Combining traditional large-format photography with a variety of analog photo-manipulation techniques, Harruthoonyan skillfully renders his subjects within ethereally illusive environments. The fastidious striations and cracks of his altered film negatives become esoteric anomalies that hearken to a unique and singular “subterranean realm”.
Harruthoonyan’s willingness to take risks within the confines of the traditional photographic process makes this representational capacity possible. Altering each negative by hand, his works crystallize midway between the calculable and the spontaneous, addressing both the systematic and the chaotic. His careful yet playful inventiveness unravels the mysteries of our collective irreconcilable reverie. Harruthoonyan’s creations conjure the lifetimes that exist within moments, and the glimmers of strangeness that give pause to our ever-evolving subconscious states. Within his work, we witness not only the captured image, but the very process of image-making laid bare. – [Ex : La Petite Mort Gallery]