Michael Wesik: Unbound Nature

Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present an on-line exhibition of new photographs by Michael Wesik. 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," Michel 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 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, BC) 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. His work is in the Polygon Corporate Art Collection, as well as numerous private collections.

Michael Wesik's exhibition is on-line June 1-June 15, 2022. 

Philip Martin Gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday from 10-5. For additional images, or information please email info@philipmartingallery.com, or call 310-559-0100. Philip Martin Gallery is located at 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034 in the Culver City area of Los Angeles between Venice Blvd. and Washington Blvd., just south of the 10 Freeway.