Artist
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A multi-site project on four billboards along East Hastings between Glen St and Clark Dr, Vancouver, and on twenty-six poster panels at Davisville Subway Station at Davisville Ave and Yonge St, Toronto as part of the CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project.
March 22 – June 9
East Hastings Billboards
May 1 – May 31
Davisville Subway Station
CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project
Inspired by painters such as Milton Avery, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Joan Miró, and Mary T. Smith, photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis is known for her colourful, unconventional images that focus on the human figure presented in an atypical fashion. She states: “Within paintings, there’s no end of things you can do with the body, and this has pushed me to see restrictions within reality differently.” The photographs Bobb-Willis creates present unusual shapes and volumes, and use colour to deconstruct the typical means by which an image is organized, such as a figure before a building or inserted in the landscape. Creating work for her own artistic practice, but also shooting editorially, she uses garments to manipulate visual boundaries and create volumetric shapes that occupy much of the picture plane, akin to the way a painter would create unfettered forms on a canvas.
While drawing inspiration from the neighbourhoods and spaces that are familiar to her, Bobb-Willis’s images push beyond the everyday to embrace tension and difference. Her unique visual language celebrates “uncomfortable positions” based on personal experiences of discomfort; leaning into tension, she gently nudges her models to move beyond typical poses so that they bend, stretch, and contort to present new visual possibilities. Her subjects act as sculptures and offer striking, surreal takes on the human form – asking us to all think differently, expansively.
The East Hastings Billboards are generously supported by Tara and Christopher Poseley.
The Davisville Subway Station is presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival.