White Noise

source:barbaracolecom
“Figure transformation has been a predominant theme in my work. Over the past thirty years I have been operating as a painter but employing traditional photographic tools.

I rework this canvas with a toolkit that includes clouds, reflections, plastic sheeting, cloth-encased figures as well as aperture, shutter speed and artificial lighting. I will photograph from above in order to flatten the perspective. It is important to me to capture these photographic constructions completely in-camera creating everything on site rather than later with Photoshop as much as possible.

Over the past decade, my practice has explored the medium of water, which has become a natural lens that refocuses and reinterprets my painterly aesthetic. Water allows me to move the human figure in unconventional ways. Photography affords me the ability to play with notions of time and place. By seeing through water, rather than through air, I am able to re-envision the nature of our relationship to our surroundings. Working in the water also provides an ideal space to continue to explore figurative. It also allows me to refocus attention on this natural resource that we have in abundance and is often taken for granted.

Challenging the perception of the figure in space is another strong thematic element in my work. Of late I find myself slowly progressing toward the almost total dissolution of the figure creating a dramatic tension between the figure and form, testing the nature of photography and its impact on our experience of reality.

While I have been creating photographic artwork since 1983, it has only been since 2002 that I have been intrigued by the possibilities of photographing people under water. Water, for me, becomes a natural lens that refocuses and reinterprets the painterly aesthetic. Water allows me to move the human figure in unconventional ways. Photography affords me the ability to play with notions of time and place. Seeing through water, rather than through air, makes me re-envision the nature of my relationship to my surroundings. I have become absorbed by the way water heightens and mythologizes human action and experience. White NOise is a collection of 10 Still images and 10 Lenticular images, all approximately 30 x 40 inches, which have been taken underwater. Here, the immersion experiences required in my earlier works (Underworld) are now combined with an attempt to extrapolate from the watery matrix in which they begin, a physical expression of the experience of selfhood. The White NOise works attempt to show us simultaneously the inside and the outside of the human act and its possible meanings.”

Like Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses, who states: “I am a part of all that I have met”, so too is photographer Barbara Cole—and she has taken her camera with her. As well, the remarkable assurance and authority of her work has been generated from the extraordinary trajectory of her career in image making.

Everything began early and abruptly for Cole. And everything that happened to her contributed a good deal to the artist she was to become. She was modeling, for example, when she was still a teenager. And although she dropped out of high school in grade twelve, she found herself, virtually overnight, transported from a temporary job as a secretary to—remarkably—the position of fashion editor for the Toronto Sun. This was in 1972. The position became an intense, hectic, protracted, hands-on photography course for a woman who, at this time, was still only nineteen years old.

“I came to be an artist simply by taking pictures”, Cole told me recently, and indeed what better way is there? Newspaper staff photographers apparently dislike doing fashion shoots, Cole assured me (it seems you couldn’t win awards that way), and so, in the Toronto Sun’s then non-unionized shop, Cole undertook them herself, learning as she went. The staff photographers seemed happy enough to teach her darkroom techniques, and within a couple of years she was creating fashion layouts for the paper, writing articles, and, more importantly, travelling the globe, taking runway photos in Paris, New York and everywhere else the momentary urgencies of fashion beckoned.

Cole was with the Toronto Sun for a decade. Then, during a sabbatical from the paper, in 1985, she began to put together her very first photographic exhibition for Toronto’s Jane Corkin Gallery. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Barbara Cole’s artwork is extensively collected by both public and private institutions, and has been exhibited worldwide in such venues as the Canadian embassies in Washington, D.C. and Tokyo, Japan. Throughout her career, Cole has worked internationally on commercial projects and large-scale art commissions including installations for the Breast Cancer Centre in Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital and for Trump Hollywood, Florida. She has won prestigious awards such as the Grand Prize at the Festival International de la Photographie de Mode in Cannes, and third prize at the International Photography Awards in New York. Barbara Cole lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
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source:boumbangcom
Originaire de Toronto, l’artiste canadienne Barbara Cole expose ses œuvres dans le monde entier. Elle a également fait des installations à l’hôpital Princess Margaret Cancer Centre de Toronto et à Trump Hollywood en Floride. Au cours de sa carrière, Barbara Cole a remporté de nombreux prix, comme le Grand Prix du Festival International de la Photographie de Mode en 2008 à Cannes mais également le Troisième Prix du International Photography Awards à New York en 2009. Depuis plusieurs années, l’artiste s’intéresse tout particulièrement au milieu aquatique, « qui recentre et réinterprète mon esthétique picturale […] et me donne la possibilité de jouer avec les notions de temps et de lieu » explique-t-elle sur son site. Entretien avec cette photographe aux travaux composites, entre photographie et peinture.