JUSTIN WADDELL

BIO

Justin Waddell graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design and received his MFA in Integrated Media from the University of Windsor in 2003. He has worked in various capacities at several Artist-Run centres, festivals, galleries and magazines in Canada including Prefi x Publishing / Prefi x ICA, Lola Magazine, Trinity Square Video, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Gendai Gallery at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. He has served as the Director of Programming at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, the Director of the Stride Art Gallery Association and as a member of the Board of Directors at The New Gallery and more recently with the every-age art and music venue, Local Library in Calgary, Alberta. His work and research is rooted in the development of a personal narrative of experimentation and process. Right now, he is interested in escapism. Waddell currently lives in Calgary, Alberta where he is a permanent instructor in the Photography Department of the Alberta College of Art + Design.

STATEMENT

“By experimenting with images that reference potentially unstable or questionable scenarios and situations, and then exhibiting them to demonstrate the spatial and temporal challenges between each image, the physical and visual enter into a complex relationship in which each attempts to overcome the other. These works are, for lack of a better word, a warning about the strategies involved in their own presentation. The strength of the relationship is in its wanting to be singularly whole and yet with another; to be engaged in an association which is self aware while continually being questioned and challenged. The selected images are informed by anecdotes and personal experiences and are re-framed to invite the viewer to re-examine the ambiguous as a site of intense fascination. Each image acts as a premonition towards the possibility of something more complex than what is immediately apparent. In my practice, images are continually collected and arranged. As the work takes on new forms, new playful realities emerge. The work is an attempt to create a relationship between images that is both pliable enough to accept influence and yet rigid enough to sustain the weight of its own form.”