Introduced by Jacob Bermel

 

In Brick‘s current issue, Jan Zwicky describes the experience of meaning as “the experience of a gestalt—either a shift out of chaos or a shift from one coherent arrangement to another, the perception of their resonant relation.” For Zwicky, meaning involves the arresting of individual perceptions into a coherent whole, an attempt to quiet the chaos of a world mediated by the sometimes resonant, and sometimes dissonant, ecologies of nature, language, and technology.

Alongside Zwicky’s piece is an equally arresting image by Jonathan Luckhurst, an Edmonton-based artist whose conceptual photography and print work respond to such ecological relationships and our perceptions of them. He has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council and was the only Canadian artist selected for the 2015 Vancouver Biennale International Residency Program.

Many of Luckhurst’s images—often untitled—incorporate analogue technologies, such as negative overlaying, photocopying, and light projection, to construct expressive biomorphic shapes that resemble and resist intelligible forms found in our natural and manufactured landscapes. This exchange between the familiar and the alien produces a sublimity that is achingly present, but also hard to locate. These images probe deeply into the dissonant exchange between landscapes, not in search of meaning per se, but seeking the gaps in seemingly coherent surfaces.

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