Amy Friend

Amy Friend, Canadian, 2019

In this small body of images chosen from different photographic series by the Canadian photographer Amy Friend, I tried to build a pool of water drawn from her photographs. As a constant motif in Friend’s work, water occupies a metaphoric position of “beginnings as well as endings”. She takes away part of its fluidity and replaces it with an amalgam of light, shimmer, and antiquity. It is a unique juncture at which a photograph is reborn as an object pregnant with the same celestial light out of which it was created!

“In my work, I gravitate towards ideas relating to time, memory, impermanence, and the fluctuations of life. I employ materials and surroundings that are familiar to me using them as starting points for my investigations. These materials become the substance I use to inform the work I create. In my practice I tend to work within the medium of photography, however, I am not concerned with capturing a “concrete” reality. Instead, I aim to use photography as a medium that offers the possibility of exploring the relationship between what is visible and non-visible.”

It was water where life appeared first. It is the same water that occupies spaces within us, outside of us, above us, and below us as a medium of growth, evolution, movement, comfort, memory, and culture. Amy Friend reinvents the primordial fluid in her distinct ways, seeking “little oceans inside of us”, gifting us with some superlative visual experiences.