LEIA GUO - EXPOSURE EMERGING PHOTOGRAPHERS SHOWCASE

“Somewhere in Nowhere” explores the feeling of hiraeth, a Welsh word that means a longing for a home that was lost or never existed. This sensation is felt when Leia travels through the landscape she grew up in. Liminal cloud formations, particularly Chinooks, became a fixation during the creation of these prints, as Leia attempts to recreate the skies she has seen in her memories over locations that bear resemblance to places she has loved for years.

This body of work includes 5 unique silver gelatin prints, displayed as a dyptic entitled “Chinook Series” and a tryptic, “Lost Series”. The artificial “Chinook arches” are created through the application of hand-blown glass plates during the printing process; a symbol of home and a gateway to fond childhood memories. In contrast, the landscape is mundane, consisting of views that cannot be traced back to a single location. By placing glass under the exposure machine, the image is distorted in a way that would not be possible through digital or analog double-exposure techniques. The process of photographing the landscape, returning to the hotshop to create specific glass “clouds”, and then exposing the print in the darkroom is an attempt to reconcile with fact that the landscapes she longs for only exist within memory. The finished photographs are “nowhere” places that are made “somewhere” by the desire of a homesick heart to find where it belongs.

BIOGRAPHY

Leia Guo is an interdisciplinary photographer and glass artist in her 5th year at AUArts. Since first picking up a camera in middle school, she has been drawn to the Albertan landscape she grew up in. Through countless trips in high school into the prairies, mountains, and foothills, Leia honed her photographic skills and fell in love with the beauty found in our unique spot in Southern Alberta. 

While she is officially registered as a BFA Glass major, Leia has spent her time throughout her undergraduate degree in both the hotshop and the darkroom, using her skills as a glassblower to complement her photographic work. Over the years, the glass forms she created in the hotshop evolved from being test subjects for learning studio lighting to unique light refracting tools in the darkroom for her silver gelatin prints, allowing her to break boundaries between her work as a craft artist and photographer. By using glass to manipulate light under an exposure machine, she can visualize the intangible, the liminal, and the sublime in her landscapes, resulting in unique prints where glass is not just an addition, but an essential collaborator.

Right now, Leia is pursuing a self-directed residency sponsored by AUArts to continue exploring various ways of incorporating glass into photographic practices, including using glass as both canvas and light manipulator. Her work has been exhibited by the Marion Nicoll Gallery, the Glass Art Society, and is currently exhibiting at the Alberta Craft Council’s “Coming Up Next” show.