The Sunshine Coast Arts Council is pleased to present the work of two photographers at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre Gallery.
The exhibitors from Feb. 21 through March 25 are Heather Conn and Florence Debeugny.
Conn, a Roberts Creek artist, will display a series entitled Maya on the Playa - Burning Man, while Debeugny of Vancouver will exhibit a series entitled through.
For more than four years Debeugny has been photographing industrial neighbourhoods, back alleys, shipyards and scrap yards through such barriers as wire fences, dirty and broken windows, often experimenting with the superimposition of multiple layers of foreground. Her current interests cover both photo-documentary and photographic abstraction.
"To create images with distinct meanings, I studied the effects of focusing either on the background or the different layers of the foreground, as well as the effects of using no focal point at all," she said. "This experiment in focus illustrates the way we observe, judge and interpret the world around us."
Debeugny was born and raised in France and immigrated to Canada in 1979 moving to Vancouver three years later. Her inspiration to document abandoned industrial places in B.C. comes from her predilection for historic environments and is influenced by the impressive industrial work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.
Choosing to immerse herself as a participant, Conn manages to photograph the keyhole look of the dizzying realm of parallel realities of Maya on the Playa, the eight-day Burning Man Festival held annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Imagine the Day of the Dead mixed with Vancouver's illuminaries, Halloween, Mardi Gras, Las Vegas, gay-pride parades, a carnival midway, an idea-fest of inventors and giant mutant vehicles (usually huge and spouting fire), a kilometre-long version of the bar scene from Star Wars, Buddhist temples, a sprinkling of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, plus an assemblage of world class pyromaniacs, and you have an inkling of what Burning Man is like. Come and celebrate with the artists from 7 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 21, at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre Gallery. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m.
