Michael Wesik’s large-scale works present the forests of British Columbia’s rugged Sunshine Coast as a boundless sensory experience - one that breaks from traditions of perspectival depth in favor of an unlimited experience of space. “The viewer’s placement in my work is a function of the way I feel. I want that placement to change, to shift, as I change and shift through the landscape,” Wesik writes. Line, color and shape combine in Wesik’s work to form densely overlaid, impenetrable foregrounds, many of which open into views down secluded paths through the forest. Whether close up, or far away, the subjects of Michael Wesik’s work - an old logging road, a salmonberry thicket, a copse of cedar - are above all physical, enveloping the viewer like an Abstract Expressionist painting, or a sublime Romantic landscape.
“I’ve found an emotional connection in a new-growth forest, a forest that was clear cut, then replanted, in the early 1990s,” Michael Wesik writes. Like a Japanese landscape, many of the scenes he shoots are maintained by way of pruning, planting and cutting, shaped by him to fit his vision, and change throughout the seasons. Wesik’s pictures are documentary and performative. Many of them are organized over days, through long or repeated exposures, which means that Wesik must return to the location of picturing for weeks or months to open the shutter of the camera. “I see the practice of photography as being fundamentally anchored in systems of rituals that, in and of themselves, are the embodiment of performative expression. Photographic decisions are essentially gestural, like brushstrokes to canvas.” Wesik’s work draws on our attempts to interpret and picture nature - be it the Literati landscape painting of the Yuan Dynasty or the photographs of Ansel Adams - and the way in which nature affects us.
Wesik’s large-format prints push the technical limits of photography, asking the camera and film to go beyond their design. “I wanted to cultivate a process where I could deploy the mechanics of analogue photographic practice in unconventional ways to generate compositions of nature that pull the lexicon of performance, like mark making, into the spatial and temporal limitations of film and print.” Wesik’s results are perceptual. His work reveals the strange and beautiful of the world around him, and invites us to participate in the sublime.
Michael Wesik (b. 1978, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) graduated from the University of British Columbia in 2006 with a BA in Art History, continuing his studies at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design from 2009-10. Michael Wesik was featured in the exhibition, "Pocket Universe" (Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA). Wesik’s work was recently the subject of a solo exhibition, “Unbound Nature,” at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Wesik's work has been the subject of solo and group exhibtions at Equinox (Vancouver, BC) and Capture Photo Fest (Vancouver, BC). His work is in the collections of Polygon Corporate Art Collection (Vancouver, BC); Fidelity Investments (Boston, MA) and Scotch Fir Point Collection (Powell River, BC). Wesik’s Powell River project is a site specific work consisting of 90 photographs. Wesik’s work has been reviewed in Daily Hive, and other publications. Michael Wesik lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles.