Laura Jane Petelko (b. 1972)

Incantation, 2021 (from the Ma series)

Petelko started her career in Vancouver as an apprentice, then master printer for Pacific coast based photographic artists such as Harmony Korine and Ed Ruscha. Over the last 20 years, now back in her native Toronto, she has become known for work of emotive sincerity and intimate and tender subject matter organised within the parameters of ongoing series. For her Endless Gone series (2019 onwards), following a 3 year period of being faced with the prognosis of impending blindness, she began to use in-camera abstraction to dissolve all the specifics of a landscape, subverting photography’s typical relationship with information, resolution and detail. The Ma (2020) series was shot - outside and at a distance - during the pandemic; collaborating with dancers from the National Ballet of Canada, stripped of their natural outlet to perform at the time, with the collaborative aim to transcend the moment and the confines of the reality, we were all living through.