Terry Ewasiuk‘s Still Lives is an exhibition of recent photography which opens on Monday May 21, 1984 at 8:00 p.m. at the Unit/Pitt Gallery, 163 West Pender St.
For the past seven years, Terry’s photos have focused on her self-portrait as subject matter and presented us with an ongoing progression that ranged from blunt emotionalism to purely formal studies that are striking in composition and colour.
With Still Lives we find that the artist has discovered her friends as a new found resource that she costumes, poses, awards roles to, and places in fabricated interiors to produce works that are a cross between tableau photography and studio portraiture. Inspiration comes from television and film, and by the use of sets, costumes, and direction the work in series points to a narrative story line.
One series of photographs are stills from the set of As the Petals Fall, a 30 minute video tape of high melodrama completed by the artist in September 1983 and hosting “a cast of colourful personalities within a set of bad antiques.”
Using a format of large scale black and white phoomurals and 16″ x 24″ colour enlargements, Terry has created larger than life situations witha brazen mixture of cutting humour and injected drama.
Exhibition continues to June 2.
