January 10 – February 22, 2025
The Main Gallery
Presented for the 2025 EXPOSURE Festival of Contemporary Photography
Opening Reception for Members and Guests: Friday January 10th, 7 -10 pm
Free admission
Ephemeral Fields is a suite of 18 autobiographical photographic diptychs by Andrzej Maciejewski – a nationally and internationally renowned Polish-born Canadian photographer and author – that explores the intersections of modern science, philosophy, and mental health.
Andrzej Maciejewski’s father, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, died by suicide exactly 50 years ago, and left 23 small notebooks with reflections on his life. Five of these books are entirely devoted to “electromagnetic events” and are meticulously transcribed textbooks that include many precise technical drawings. After so many years of missing him, Andrzej started to have an impression that his interest in science was driven by desperate and futile attempts to find a scientific explanation for his delusions and feeling of being manipulated.
Life was not much more but combination of electromagnetic events — short, chaotic, unique — the product of unpredictable and mysterious possibilities of random events.
On the left-hand side of the diptychs are photographs of pencil drawings and notes by Andrzej’s father. They are captured with the harsh lighting and deep shadows of experimental 1920s Russian filmmakers (with a nod to Alexander Rodchenko and August Sander, among others), and each involves an element of ephemeral movement.
The images on the right-hand side of the diptychs exist in counterpoint and are extracted from mundane everyday objects and occurrences that directly relate to specific events of the life of Andrzej’s father — the mixing of a freshly boiled soup, the fanning out of his father’s playing cards — occurrences that are rarely noticed or observed. These small, ephemeral moments are unrepeatable, capturing a moment that can only ever happen once. Shown at the microscopic scale, these objects transform into something symbolic, unique and ephemeral. These images are empirical “proof” of theories explained by the numbers, equations, and diagrams on the left side image.
These images ponder on the life of Andrzej’s father — how his mind created a semblance of control over random, uncontrollable occurrences, and eventually killed him. Paired together, the diptychs speak to the power of legacy, the narrative of autobiography, mental health, particle physics, and the ephemeral nature of existence.
Artist’s Biography
Andrzej Maciejewski (pron. Andgey Matcheyevsky) was born in 1959 in Poland. He studied at the Warsaw College of Photography in Poland, the Polish Society of Art Photographers School, and the College of Photographic Arts in Ostrava in the Czech Republic. In 1985 he moved to Canada. He worked as a commercial photographer in Toronto until mid-1990s. He then moved to the countryside in Eastern Ontario and devoted himself entirely to his art. He has published 5 books: “Bread” (1996), “Toronto Parks” (1997), “After Notman” (2003), “Garden of Eden” (2012), and “Weather Report” (2016). “After Notman” was a Canadian bestseller and has been widely discussed internationally.
Maciejewski’s work has been exhibited at over 60 solo shows in Canada, USA, Poland, UK, Germany, Norway, Latvia, Finland, and Uganda. His 2015 series “Weather Report” involved a series of Camera Obscura images of the same place in different weather conditions, where his 2011 series “Garden of Eden” – that has exhibited internationally – explored the form of still life, translating iconic paintings through photography. Maciejewski’s much-lauded 2013 series, “After Notman” involved exact rephotographs of 19th Century Notman’s Montréal views, and his “VIP Portrait Gallery” – that was first shown at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s (NL) – explored traditional portraiture lighting and techniques using potatoes as the subject.
His works are found in several private and public art collections including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montréal, the Preus Museum in Horten, Norway, and the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Dortmund, Germany, among others. He teaches photography in the Fleming College – Haliburton School of Art + Design in Haliburton, Ontario.
The creation of Ephemeral Fields has been supported by a Research and Creation Grant from Canada Council for the Arts and a Project Grant from the Ontario Arts Council.
Top Image: Potatoes, bread, sour cream, wristwatch: 2021, archival inkjet prints
Courtesy of the artist
