Exhibition: Urban Traces ~ blink time

“Urban Traces ~ blink time” Selected works by Mary Jo Bedford
Quiqcorp ART SPACE, 155 High Street, Christchurch, Ph: 341-7692

Mary Jo has previously exhibited solo in Sydney, Australia and Lyttelton.

Mary Jo is a well published and multi award winning photographer from British Columbia; now a permanent resident of New Zealand. She has a B.S. in Design as well as a Diploma in Photojournalism (hons.). She enjoys teaching art photography at the University of Canterbury U.C. Opportunity program and University of Auckland Centre for Continuing Education.

She states that “There is a ghostly time between moments when there is no time or sound or movement. These images capture that bit of time between time; 1/4000 of a second or less. It is so infinitesimal that is does not exist in memory separate from other moments; yet here on paper is physical proof that it was.”

While a painter has the liberty of reworking reality by subtracting and adding objects, adjusting light and atmosphere and working from his memory of time, place and feeling, Mary Jo as a photographer, will edit directly from life. She says that she has “only a blink in time to see, feel, react and capture. One fragment of a second before or after the moment will result in an image that is flat, lost, untelling of feeling.”

Furthermore, she rejects the use of digital manipulation in her work stating that:
“Massaging an image with digital manipulation only further muddies the moment. If that intangible thing is not within the image, it cannot be infused into it by any means.”

She says, “ All of what I am and have been and never was collides with what is before me in a burst of feeling and recognition. That moment is captured in a millisecond. It flies into the camera, rests upon the sensor and is experienced anew each time the image is viewed. It resides within the image; that thing that is the sum of the moment and my feeling”.

“ A viewer senses it and responds involuntarily.”

She feels that sharply defined, heavily detailed images restrict expression of the atmosphere of the moment. To force detail on a viewer hinders the communication of more ethereal information. Her intention is to initiate a period of adjustment in the viewer so that he may begin to see the image in another way.

“As details fade, the unseen becomes visible.”

“Urban Traces ~ blink time” runs from the 3 June - 1 July, 2009.
The opening for the show will be on 3 June at 5:30 pm.