Main Gallery
See Attached
November 5, 2015 – January 14, 2016

Artists: Dianne Bos and Sarah Fuller
Curated by Josephine Mills

Bos and Fuller (currently based in Calgary and Ottawa respectively) have a long-standing conversation around their mutual interest in exploring photography. In 2013, they produced a publication and had a small exhibition arising from this dialogue. See Attached at the U of L Gallery will feature new work and highlights from the photographs and e-mails which they have exchanged since 2010 as well as incorporating new images produced at the U of L’s Coutts Centre in Nanton.

Curatorial Statement
See Attached is not easy to categorize. It is an exhibition, but also a collaboration, a conversation, a process, and a work-in-progress. Artists Dianne Bos and Sarah Fuller each have successful solo careers, but their interests overlap in multiple ways and from these on-going discussions, they decided to produce a project that makes their exchange public. In addition to the fabulous variety of photographs and their e-mail correspondence, I was taken with how the project makes visible the necessary interaction between artists in the creation of their work and the support of their careers. Often these relationships are invisible to the art audience and viewers could carry on thinking of artists conceiving their ideas and carrying them out in isolation. In fact, the kind of dialogue that artists have with their peers and faculty in university carries on throughout the development of their practice. It is these artist friendships and connections that push them, open up new possibilities, and are crucial in sustaining their practice. As is evident in Bos’ and Fuller’s particularly rich and wonderful exchange, the connection across generations is essential to the development and renewal of an artist’s work. See Attached gives viewers a chance to see what goes on behind the scenes as two artists play with ideas, techniques, and imagery.

Dianne Bos, Sarah Fuller, and the U of L Art Gallery would like to thank the wonderful staff in the UofL Theatre for lending props for this exhibition.

– Josephine Mills, Director/Curator, U of L Art Gallery

Artists Statement
We initially started a photo-sharing email correspondence in order to keep in touch with each other’s work over a long distance, but also to start a photo response dialogue or discussion. The works we sent each other didn’t have to be ‘new’ but rather had to be work we felt responded to the work we had received (hence the exhibition title: See Attached). We both employ a variety of antiquated photographic techniques from the simplest photograms to pinhole and toy cameras. We also both enjoy using film in medium and large format cameras and even digital cameras – after all, the digital era made this kind of correspondence possible.

Our one rule is that each image must find its inspiration in the previous photograph sent – this can be formally, conceptual or via subconscious impulse. The majority of the images are created in direct response to the game, and technologies ranging from pinhole photography to scanning are employed.

What began as a playful attempt to maintain a friendship and artistic relationship over continents, has developed and grown into a new way of thinking about each other’s practices. The very nature of the game has loosened up our conceptions of the type of work that we do.

The images selected have been surprising to both of us and have made us think about our work in a different way; the inspiration for the next image selection is coming from something random. The game of choosing and sending relates to earlier artists’ games such “Le Cadavre Exquis” used by the Surrealists.

This process has also been an avenue to explore shared interests such as scale, found sculpture, and found collage. We enjoy looking at landscape, and choose to focus on the serendipitous evidence of humanity’s impact on the environment, which often comes through as humorous, uncanny and as poetic juxtapositions. The imagery also reflects our interest in sculpture and bringing photography into the 3-D world.

Finally, each subsequent correspondence and image became not only a snapshot of where we are artistically, but also where we are in our personal lives and where we are located in physical geography.

– Dianne Bos and Sarah Fuller