• Photography
  • Artist Statement
Crusta
Escape
Homestead
Markings
Still Life
Textura
Salt & Ice

Photography Statement:
The photographer Muybridge and his movement studies led to exploring the process of image making, while images of a Graffiti Series by the Hungarian Gyula Halasz, later known as Brassi, inspired exploration of richness of forms in the macrocosm of our environment and brought photographic works into my expression after more than thirty years of working predominantly in three-dimension.  Digital technology allowed an exploration of the subtle and sensuous shifts of line, texture, and color of the exquisite textures and patterns found in nature, and enabled transformation of the core of reality by disconnecting from the familiar expectations that limit our everyday experience, beginning the "Crusta" and “Escape” series of images. This journey led to exploring aspects that delineate passages that marked my life and engendered the need to define and record these markings, these periods.

MARKINGS: adjective/noun
To designate, to distinguish, to make a mark upon, to name as in branding, earmarking, impressing, imprinting, initialing, inscribing, labeling, lettering, notching, scoring, signing, stamping, tagging.

We are surrounded by markings—both literal and symbolic. Societies mark. People draw, paint, and leave graffiti; they imprint their existence with scrapes, scratches, carvings in walls and paint, and they build to signify “We were here.” Nature marks with patterns in plant growth; it weathers and rusts manmade structures and equipment, and it opens chasms in the earth that allow exploration of the inner world.

As we define these periods in our lives we, in turn, are marked by these circumstances and processes on multiple levels. By exploring images like the “Crusta” and “Escape” series from Chickakoo Lake, Alberta, I “mark” my connection to the environment. The images from the Railway Museum and “Homestead” are the “Markings” that record my family history and the farmland that had been part of the Michel First Nations Reserve and is now under the protection of Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. These images are my way of revisiting that which grounds me; a touchstone on my journey, a punctuation of the many endings I’ve experienced.

Margaret Losinski