DAVID ELLINGSEN PHOTOGRAPHY

Contrary to the digital trend in the industry these days, Kodak has just introduced a new line of large format film in the 4×5 and 8×10 inch sizes. Their Ektar 100 film was introduced in 2008 and it seems is popular enough to now produce in these dimensions. Makes me feel like getting out my 4×5 again…

Kodak’s website says to expect it to be available in April 2010. If anyone gets a hold of some, I’d love to hear from you on it’s performance…

My friend and fellow photographer Elaine Ling was mentioned in this weekend’s Globe & Mail. Her beautiful new book “Mongolia – Land of the Deer Stone” has recently been published and was given a glowing write-up in the Saturday edition.

I met Elaine at the Lishui Photo Festival in China in December. The only other Canadian at the event, we spent many hours discussing photography on our photo expeditions. It was great to have someone to lament the demise of the Polaroid 55PN film with…she has used that film for most of her career. We also spoke about the transition from film to digital in the Fine Art realm which is a discussion I seem to be having a lot these days in one form or another (sidebar: check out curator/gallery owner Brian Clamp’s excellent interview on Adbase for some interesting words on this theme). Elaine is a fascinating person who’s 25 year career has yielded some stellar work. The G&M article is more eloquent than I so I’ll leave the rest to them.

Congratulations Elaine!

Woodstock Times Review

From the Woodstock Times.
By Paul Smart.
12/17/2009

ORGANIC IMPERFECTIONS
With all the speed of our being swallowed by the current digital age, it’s easy to forget much of what’s being lost these days.
Galerie BMG’s current exhibition through January 11, “Hibernus…a winter study” by Canadian photographer, David Ellingsen, utilizes what was once one of the prime materials for certain specialized visual artists…Polaroid film.
Stuff’s gone now, like the warmth of recordings released on vinyl, or 16mm film screenings with the projector rattling and the dust motes dancing in a stream of near liquid narrative light. Like Brownie snapshots or hand-written letters, for that matter. Remember aerograms?
For the current show’s series of richly textured and mystery-evoking floral works, Ellingsen has collected natural plants during the final stages of their being and then used an archaic Polaroid 55PN film, as fine-grained, textured and rich with organic imperfections as the collection it’s being used to capture, to make it lasting art.
Talk about two eras ending, and an artist’s use of his tools, his means, to comment on his subject matter, the end. Or vice-versa.
The resulting photographs, created in-studio and hand-processed in the darkroom, are solarized during the development process and printed to archival, museum exhibition standards.
The results speak to what the artist has referred to as his lifelong ambition to find a way of combining the elements inherent in his boyhood on a communal island north in British Columbia, where he learned to appreciate the juxtaposition of seemingly oddly matched elements, from water and ice and nature versus technology to the rural and urban he now sees coming together in his adopted city. Or these lively new floral works about the natural process of death and decay.
The Vancouver-based photographer has augmented a strong career in commercial and editorial work with a burgeoning fine art career that has seen his works appear in numerous solo and group museum and gallery exhibitions, and win awards and prizes from a variety of organizations including the International Photography Awards in Los Angeles, Black & White Magazine in San Francisco, PX3 in Paris and Applied Arts in Toronto.

Hibernus….a winter study will be on display through January 11, 2010. Winter gallery hours at 12 Tannery Brook Road are Friday noon-5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday noon-5 p.m. or other times by appointment. For more information, call 679-0027 or visit www.galeriebmg.com.

Matrix Magazine issue 84 has reviewed Body of Text, the collaborative book I worked on with writer and performance artist Michael V. Smith.

“I’m not lingering over a turn of phrase here, but the fact of the book, the flipping through it, the returning to it, the showing it around, and finally, the wrapping my head around it, enjoying the pleasure of it, the tease of it, the let’s-see-if-we-can-get-away-with-this of it, makes me think about the queerness of concrete poetry.” “Put it on your coffee table and bring it out when conversation lulls at your dinner parties of craven intellectuals…”
- T.L. Cowan, Matrix Magazine.

“Trying to find a copy of Michael V. Smith and David Ellingsen’s experimental work Body of Text in any typical Toronto bookstore is much like asking a kinesiology major at a university kegger whether or not he’s read Ulysses. You enter into it with all the hope you can muster, somehow knowing that the outcome will be painfully disappointing.”
- Karen Correia Da Silva, Broken Pencil Magazine (Utne Independent Press Awards nominee).

and…

“Body of Text is a collection of concrete poems made by marrying poetry with body-based performance art and documentary photography. Dressed in a full black body-suit, Michael V. Smith is photographed by David Ellingsen in hundreds of poses which resemble Greco-Roman letters, Asian characters, heiroglyphs, or Rorschach inkblots. These are then arranged in book form, to a maximum of three images per page. In the same spirit of moving beyond language as heard in the sound poetry of Christian Bok, the poems in Body of Text occupy a liminal space between poetry and visual art. The body is made work, is made site, object and subject. The body is symbol.”
- Bookthug Publishing.