Alain Paiement constructs photographs that depict multiple spaces simultaneously. He photographs architecture and uses photography as architecture by reducing all space to a single plane. What was once relief becomes surface. Like a cartographer, he transcribes the real world into the virtual. Conventional building-scapes are deconstructed and sewn back together again into a “seamless quilt”. The results are stranger than fiction, as the viewer is offered a radically new understanding of the space depicted. Paiement presents “tangible evidence of a world that, while continuous with our own, had previously lingered just beyond ordinary human perception.”

Paiement’s work requires a careful navigation to absorb the amount of detail he fits into a picture. With the roofs removed, the audience bears witness to the life of “every man” amid his personal and sometimes tumultuous surroundings. The experience triggers a voyeuristic response and a feeling of vertigo. The viewer relishes a vantage point that is both unnatural and hyper-realistic, which touches on our current fascination with private lives made public. The scrutinizing gaze is sharpened and focused consistently across the entire surface. Paiement’s work announces a rare encounter “in which technical and conceptual innovation float in perfect, precarious equilibrium.”

“Explore the differences between looking at the
world and being conscious of that looking.”

By highlighting spaces, or in the artist’s case, the sky or air that would otherwise be ignored, Crystal Liu pays homage to the marginal and the peripheral in her deceptively simple photographs. Landscapes float up into view with a delicate touch “more akin to painting than photography”. Crystal is an avid traveler. Her photos hail from cities such as Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago and Glasgow. But rather than document these voyages in a customary style, she photographs the edges of trees or of buildings, “merely giving a hint of where (she) might have been, when (she) looked up into the sky.” The vastness and freedom in her work (both from conventional photography as well as from facing the real subject at hand) allows the viewer to surrender, re-imagine or re-create the landscape or interior as a personal reverie or memory.

Influenced by German photographer Uta Barth, who herself alludes to places rather than describes them, Liu shifts attention away from the subject matter and redirects focus to the process of perception. Never entirely abstract, her landscapes and interiors are made visually ambiguous in order to spur examination of the particular ways we come to expect pictures to affect us. Her works reinvest with consequence the negative spaces that elude us in our visually-saturated surroundings.