BOB CARNIE PHOTOGRAPHY
NATURE
Alongside his own photographic practice, Toronto-based artist and printer Bob has earned an international reputation for printing traditional and digital fine art. Next year, in 2023, he will mark fifty years contributing to the art and science of Canadian and international photography.
This intensely personal series of photographs was taken during Bob’s visits to his family’s former retreat in the Muskokas over a two-year period. Each frame suggests an acutely felt experience of place, past and present, a melancholic recognition of familiar terrain in each tree and shoreline. These images form an archive imprinted with the feel of a long-ago family album. The muted tones of gum bichromate and palladium historical processes intensify the pervading sense of a paradise both found and lost.
CONSUMPTION
This body of work focuses on everyday items that we collect, consume, then recycle or discard. From the food we eat to the products and objects that we use daily, cherish, and play with, this work will function as a quirky snapshot of the timeline I lived in for the generations to come.
In three hundred years, the food we eat may look completely different - The potential for a meatless society where the idea of soup with floating bones for broth and taste will be seen as odd. The simple bicycles and musical instruments of our time may garner a thoughtful laugh or admiration of our ability to entertain ourselves with such simplicity. Even the clothes or the shoes we wear all unique artifacts, commenting on this period in history.
Images of shiny fishing lures, often appearing abstract in these images, memorialize these functional yet strange-looking objects that we once attached to fishing lines and bobbed for fish to eat.
This body of work is about us and the cyclical relationship to items that we use and discard. Though some of these objects will never fully decompose themselves, the archival nature of my work will ensure that future generations can enjoy, puzzle, and ponder what it all meant to their forebears.