Public reception tonight for the Esplanade’s current exhibitions

By Medicine Hat News on February 1, 2018.

Medicine Hat News

A Medicine Hat photographer’s first solo show, the Gas City debut of the Exposure Photography Festival and crafts and art from war-time will all be celebrated at the Esplanade tonight.

The trio of current exhibitions — Wes Bell’s On The Line, Dianne Bos’s The Sleeping Green and Keepsakes of Conflict from the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery — are connected but also unique in their own way.

Bell’s and Bos’s exhibits both used traditional film cameras and darkroom printing, very unusual in this day and age.

Bell returned to Medicine Hat about four years ago after years as a fashion photographer based in style hotspots London, Milan and New York City.

“He left fashion and has taken up fine art photography again and is doing extremely well,” said Joanne Marion, the Esplanade’s director/curator of exhibitions and collections. “It’s wonderful to be able to present his first solo show here.”

Bos, the founder of the Exposure Photography Festival, has been on Marion’s radar for a while. She said it’s a thrill to have the founder here for Medicine Hat’s first foray into the festival.

“When I looked to her recent work, it’s all about our understanding and memory of the First World War,” said Marion. “She went to the various sites in France and Belgium and shot those sites using traditional film cameras and worked in the darkroom to create these prints that have overlays on them and objects laid on top of them. They’re very mysterious and very poetic and are more about how we may feel about those sites and that war rather than being a documentation of that site.”

For her photographs Bos used pinhole camera, an ancient technique based on camera obscura where the photographer is not using a lens but instead a hole inside a box to expose the film.

“It gives a very dramatic effect and it’s also a very long exposure so that means anything that moves becomes invisible so that really contributes to the poetic and mysterious air that the photographs have,” Marion said.

Like The Sleeping Green, Keepsakes of Conflict is rooted in war.

“It’s full of the crafts and art that men and women in conflict situation have made, everything from carved bullets to embroidery,” Marion said. “There are some really, really beautiful things made out of all the materials they had at hand, which often are war-related materials of course, not just the First World War but from any number of conflicts over the past 100 years.”

The eveing will also mark the opening of the Archives Vignette Force of Nature.

Both Bell and Bos will be at the free public reception tonight which begins at 7 p.m. Music will be provided by The Natasha Shannon Trio and refreshments and a cash bar will be available.

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