Natural History Museum Exhibition

A few more Canadians artists were featured than last year. Of the 17,000 entries to the competition, 84 images were selected, and on display, depicting animals and nature from the city parks in Rome to the snowy Transylvanian mountains. The room was dark, illuminated mostly by the backlit photographs themselves and the stock atmospheric nature CD played from hidden speakers.

The images are examples of photographs which come from hours of waiting and waiting and shooting and shooting, and living out of a tent and cooking over an open flame for three weeks in wild solitude. Often the elements would compose themselves from chance as a bird positioned itself in front of the full moon, just before the weather becomes too spectacularly inclement to continue.

Somehow I felt that the photos I was looking at did not fit within the rubric of contemporary fine art. They didn’t enter the discourse with the same propositional irony, or inferences of meta-narratives that characterize the exploratory nature of today’s practice. Perhaps in contrast to the self-reflexivity of leading practitioners, these photos are simply about compositional beauty – which on many accounts presents a rather naive and old-fashion subject matter for art. As a consequence, I felt oddly guilty for enjoying it so much.

The show made me realise that the urban environment does not provide all of the compositional beauty that I would ideally be able to include in my work.