Nadia Belerique is pregnant with the inspirational force of the countless images she viewed as photo editor for the Toronto Star. As a recent MFA grad with a photo-heavy component in her artistic practice, she came well equipped to that contract, which involved selecting which archived photos should be converted to digital. Sifting through decades of news shots was stimulating, but it was the cropping, masking, and bylines of the images that germinated more ideas.
It seems that masks and masking are heavy on the artist's mind. We met at the Dufferin Mall to enjoy the food court skylights and ended up shopping for gel masks. Belerique uses objects (perhaps these masks) in her practice to imitate, expound, disrupt or augment her photographs and found images. With a keen intellect and flashes of humour, Belerique is able, with spartan means, to convey the transportive and transformative yet limiting properties of photography. Belerique is showing in March, in the second instalment of The Venn Diagram, a curatorial collaboration between Jon Davies and Kristin Weckworth at Narwhal Projects.
This is what happens when our featured artist helps direct the photo shoot!
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