Exhibition: Stephen Bulger Gallery – Elaine Stocki – P.A.

Reception: Friday, October 25, 6-10pm

TORONTO, Oct. 16, 2013 /CNW/ – The gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of work by Elaine Stocki (b. 1979, Winnipeg). In “P.A.,” Stocki questions authenticity and artifice in the photographic medium by combining constructed performance images and documentary photography.

“P.A.” (Public Address) consists both of images of models in contrived scenarios and photographs of assemblages of people at events. By presenting these two types of works together, Stocki investigates the truth of the directed image and the artifice behind the documentary photographs and, in broader terms, value in the medium itself. Through both content and process, Stocki’s work exploits the uneasy relationship the photographic medium has with art, hobby and commerce.

Influenced by American street photography, Stocki’s work promotes the belief that photographs of groups of people take the political and social temperature of the moment. She makes meticulously hand-coloured, gelatin silver and chromogenic photographs. Deftly using photographic and cinematic tropes, her images reside in an uneasy territory in which the signifiers that we attach to class and race become uncertain and unknowable.

Stocki received an MFA from Yale University in 2009 and currently lives and works in Canada. Her work has been exhibited across North America, including Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadephia; Zach Feuer, New York and overseas at the Deustche Guggenheim, Berlin.