Laura Jane Petelko

Petelko started her career in Vancouver as apprentice, then master printer for Pacific coast based photographic artists such as Harmony Korine and Ed Ruscha.

Over the last 20 years, now back in her native Toronto, she has become known for work of emotive sincerity and intimate and tender subject matter organised within the parameters of ongoing series. For her Endless Gone series (2019 onwards), following a 3 year period of being faced with the prognosis of impending blindness, she began to use in-camera abstraction to dissolve all the specifics of a landscape, subverting photography’s typical relationship with information, resolution and detail. The Ma (2020) series was shot - outside and at a distance - during the pandemic; collaborating with dancers from the National Ballet of Canada, stripped of their natural outlet to perform at the time, with the collaborative aim to transcend the moment and the confines of the reality, we were all living through.

Ma

“Ma is a Japanese concept of negative space that relates to all aspects of life. Rather than an absence, it is the gap in perception that allows for diffuse thought. The interval created, whether in the mind or the physical realm, is a regenerative pause. Within this space, a break in the composition of our active minds can exist, deepening our awareness of what is around us.

This series was photographed during the pandemic lockdowns; collaborating with dancers from the National Ballet Of Canada, choreographers and other artists, who were unable to perform at the time, the images were photographed outside and at a distance with the aim to transcend the moment and the reality, we were all living through. (With thanks to: actor, Chloe Rose; dancer, Adelaide Sadler; choreographer and dancer, Andrea Nan; and from the National Ballet Of Canada: Connor Hamilton, Calley Skalnik (First Soloist) and Siphe November (Principal Dancer).”