May 8 – June 22, 2024
(Main Gallery)

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 11, 2 to 5 pm

Lonsdale Gallery is thrilled to announce Alternate Horizons, an exhibition celebrating the creativity and magic of alternative process and experimental photography. Presenting a selection of work of four skilled contemporary female lens based artists exploring how the intangible concepts of time and memory can be captured in a still image. The work presented defies expectations of what a photograph can be. 

Alternate Horizons, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

From Sally Ayre’s buoyant hand-woven cyanotypes; Nicole Cudzilo’s ethereal 24 karat gold leaf Polaroid portraits; Natalie Hunter’s large format colour transparent photo-based sculptures; to Peggy Taylor Reid’s riveting installation of circular cyanotypes. The artists assembled approach image making in fresh and innovative ways, thinking beyond the boundaries of the pictorial frame, revealing the endless creativity and expressive possibilities of contemporary experimental photography practices. The only limit is the artist’s imagination.

Nicole Cudzilo’s intimate portraits, layered with 23-karat gold leaf, present an uncanny vision that immediately grabs hold of the imagination. Using modern Polaroid film, she carefully peels away the backing, to produce a type of transparency. Then 23k gold is carefully hand painted onto the reverse side to create a one-of-a-kind photograph. She takes advantage of the contained format of Polaroid film, highlighting its intimacy and ephemerality. Her images capture the magic of watching a Polaroid image appear faintly before your eyes.

Nicole Cudzilo
Figure
2024
polaroid and 23k gold leaf
edition of 3
17 x 17 (framed)
$750

Cudzilo mines imagery from the past to produce images that are both timeless and speak to the contemporary experience. Working primarily in self- portraiture, she casts herself as subject and creator, artist and muse. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Cudzilo studied under the guidance of photographer Laurie Klein, a pupil of Ansel Adams. She is known for her colorful character based self-portraits donning bright midcentury dresses and campy wigs, evoking Cindy Sherman’s early ‘untitled film stills’.

Nicole Cudzilo
Nude in Shadow
2024
polaroid and 23k gold leaf
edition of 3
17 x 17 (framed)
$750

Alternate Horizons, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Peggy Taylor Reid
Tapestry of Shadows
2024
cyanotype on vintage photo filter paper
unique prints
installtion: dimensions variable

Peggy Taylor Reid’s captivating installation Tapestry of Shadows draws attention to how plastics and post-consumer waste infiltrates every aspect of the environment. Taylor Reid creates handmade circular cyanotype prints on vintage photographic filter paper arranged into a large wall installation evoking constellations, based on images from the James Webb telescope.

The cyanotypes prints are layered with plants, both cultivated and foraged, and clear plastic waste items. The traces of plastics intrude throughout the cyanotype prints, like an invasive species, but in this case it is one of our own creation.

Alternate Horizons, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Sally Ayre’s ongoing project, Natural Patterns, Woven Series, explores our continually changing environment, where changes construct layers of memories that weave together past and present. Sumptuous Prussian blue and warm tea coloured, screen prints on handmade Japanese washi paper, are hand-woven to create delicate multi-layered images. Ayre examines plant specimens, and their seeds (lupines, milkweed, morning glory, bittersweet, indigo and burrs), as they scatter and germinate, constantly regenerating themselves. She chooses seed from the end of a plant’s life cycle as a metaphor for the aging process. Like the plants and their seeds, the knowledge and experience acquired as we grow older is passed on to others.

Sally Ayre
Morning Glory, Natural Patterns Woven Series
2020
cyanotype and screenprint, cut and woven
edition of 1
16. 5 x 16.5 inches
$1,000

Sally Ayre
Bittersweet, Natural Patterns Woven Series
2020
cyanotype and screenprint, cut and woven
edition of 1
16. 5 x 16.5 inches
$1,000

Alternate Horizons, Gallery View
Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Nathalie Hunter’s multilayered immersive photo-based installations on transparent film are a striking meditation on the slow passage of time. Hunter is an award winning interdisciplinary artist, working between photography, sculpture, installation, and the moving image.

Sun Slips, cascading shadows, a unique photo-based installation of colour transparent photographs suspended and floating in space, witnessing the slow passage of light over time. Using various made from salvaged materials and colour films, Hunter photographed miniature sculptural forms with multiple exposures as the sun shifts across the space; changing the composition of each structure in remarkable, yet subtle ways.

Natalie Hunter
Sun Slips, cascading shadows 4
2021
archival pigment print on transparent film, turned aluminum, birch, light.
unique
84 x 34 x 7 inches
$4,200

Natalie Hunter
Sun Slips, cascading shadows 3
2021
archival pigment print on transparent film, turned aluminum, birch, light.
unique
84 x 34 x 7 inches
$4,200

Natalie Hunter, Slow Sun series (2020), Installation view
Alternate Horizons, Lonsdale Gallery, Main Floor

Presented along side select photographs from the artist’s Slow Sun series, where she seeks to captures the slow passage of light and the sun across the sky. Shot using continuous rolls of colour film exposed over a period of many months. Exposures are made days, and sometimes weeks apart, to produce are saturated extended montages, where the camera aperture creates layered moments in time.

How do you catch a breath?
How do you hold light? How do you hang on to a memory?

Pointing to the sky and staring into the sun while passing colour filters in front of the camera aperture creates layered moments in time. Exposures are made days and sometimes weeks apart, allowing a viewer to experience many skies in one image. 

Natalie Hunter
Slow Sun 20
2020
archival pigment print on baryta paper.
edition of 3
16 x 24 inches (unframed)
$775

Natalie Hunter
Slow Sun 1
2020
archival pigment print on baryta paper.
edition of 3
16 x 24 inches (unframed)
$775