RAPT & CALLUS - THE STRANGE BIFURCATED WORLD OF BEAUTY AND BRUTALITY, WES BELL          

Contemporary Calgary 
February 10 – February 27

The scenes that I am most attracted to are simple and ordinary. Based on isolating and elevating the ubiquitous and unseen by attuning our perceptions with our emotions, the photographs open in a landscape of tightly focused moments of intense engagements between man and nature. ​ 

In this exhibition, I am presenting two photographic series, Rapt and Callus. The images reveal the strange bifurcated world of beauty and brutality. The sites I photographed spoke to me strongest in the days of transition from winter to spring when the scenes were enveloped in flat, grey light and there was no foliage on the trees, leaving them naked as if the trees wore no clothes exposing the man-made indignities.​ 

In Rapt, the wires, cables and chains that cut into the trunk of the trees (a process literally called 'strangulation'), the organic vegetal response seems to embody human, visceral feelings of pain, emotional constriction and dogged survival. Callus exposes the formation of thick and hardened tissue that develops over time where physical trauma such as the removal of a branch or limb occurs often due to deliberate pruning or lopping causing a wound. This innate survival response permits the plant to protect itself from disease, rot, and susceptibility to premature mortality. ​ 

Through these two series of photographs, our emotions become more accessible and visible through Walter Benjamin's "optical unconscious", illuminating a clearer perception into the tangled root of my depression. ​ 

Given the focus of the subject matter on the various physical, material processes of decomposition, oxidation, and the organic workings of plant life, it was critical to the logic of these two series to maintain the immediacy of their chemical, indexical imprint on the film, and its translation onto a slightly warm tone, fibre-based paper used for gelatin silver prints, creating a substantial presence that would have been impossible to achieve digitally. ​ 

For information on opening hours and covid requirements, please see the venue’s website – contemporarycalgary.ca

Access: Location is wheelchair accessible

#701 11th Street SW, Calgary, AB T2P 2C4