October 9- November 21, 2026
The Main Gallery
Opening Reception *: Friday, October 9, 2026, from 7 pm to 9:30 pm
Free admission
Wenda Salomons: gesture
“gesture” is an exhibition of eighteen digital pinhole photographs by Wenda Salomons, an Edmonton-based art photographer and educator. The exhibition explores and celebrates abstraction and movement within the Alberta landscape. In addition to the pinhole process, intentional camera movement (ICM) is employed in the capture of these images. This pairing results in photographs that are both enigmatic and dynamic.
In this body of work, Salomons engages concepts of landscape, embodiment, and the familiar. In her art practice she asks, “What is my embodied relationship to this land?” and “How am I affected by/affecting my local, familiar surroundings?” Spinning off of entanglement theory, Salomons wonders about the impacts of interactions with plants, with trees, and of movement among them. She seeks to capture the vitality and liveliness in her subjects as well as in the spaces between her body and theirs.
Her process begins with cultivating attention to what sparks interest, evokes, or visually calls from the environment. Then attention is paid to the call, and curiosity is utilized to bring focus. The essence of the experience is sought, and attempts are made to capture it photographically. The essence of the experience is variable: the way the light falls on the subject, the interplay of colour, texture, and pattern, or the indescribable feeling of something noteworthy. Thus, a relationship is co-built.
The origins of the word “gesture” are rooted in meaning related to the human body: how one carries it, and how one expresses feeling with it. In these images, Salomons offers perspectives on how it feels to move a human body through the natural world and through life. Across the four seasons of Alberta landscapes, she documents this experience of movement, gesturing to the viewer along the way in hopes of cultivating attention, appreciation, and wonder.
Artist’s Statement
“The world is not what I think, but what I live.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
In this body of work, I examine and explore movement through the Alberta landscape. Whether a tree-lined path, a wind-blown hillside of grass, or a crossroads, in each capture I seek to understand my relationship to the environment, to the movements of my own body as it comes into contact with the movements of the natural bodies around me.
My process involves longer exposures while hand-holding a DSLR fitted with a homemade pinhole lens. This process facilitates the creation of unexpected, gestural images through the intentional movements of my body: the gentle, rhythmic movements brought on by breathing, the wilder, erratic movements as my arms shift the camera up and down, and the slow, ponderous movements as I step forward during exposure.
My aim in creating this dynamic body of work is to both discover and reveal uncommon imagery and perspectives of the Alberta landscape.
In the rich history of Canadian landscape art, representations of broad and wide expanses of land have often been heralded. By contrast, I find myself curious about our closer and nearer experiences with the land, and how these experiences might shift and change us; how we might perceive this Treaty 6 land and its inhabitants differently because of our movements through it. With this work, I propose a view of nature that honours the near, the quotidian, and the familiar while simultaneously exposing the enigmatic and the liminal. I suggest that our worlds are not only what we move through, but what we perceive as we move and how we make meaning from that movement.
Artist’s Biography
Wenda Salomons is a Canadian art photographer and educator based in Edmonton (also known as Amiskwaciwâskahikan) on Treaty 6 Territory in Alberta. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design with a major in Photography from the University of Alberta, graduating in 1989. Wenda has been working with pinhole cameras for over 30 years. Her bodies of work generally explore the abstract rather than the directly representational; the liminal and mysterious, rather than the concrete and realistic. More recently, she has included intentional camera movement in her work.
Through pinhole photography, Salomons seeks to visually engage the audience and stimulate dialogue at the intersections of natural and human environments where tension and harmony coexist. She aims to both please and confound by presenting familiar shapes and subjects in unfamiliar settings, and by using pattern and texture to expand perception and relationship. Spontaneity and chance play a key role in the production of her work. She finds kinship and inspiration in the works of other fine art photographers, such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who also employed intentional movement while exploring the enigmatic.
Salomons has lectured and led workshops on pinhole photography, while maintaining her own studio practice. Her work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions across Canada and in the USA. Her prints are held in private and public collections across North America.
Top image: Wenda Salomons – Trees XLIII, 2026; archival pigment print, VE 1/3. Image courtesy of the artist.
*Opening Receptions are for Members and Guests
