PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Toni Hafkenscheid

October 28 - December 3, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday, October 28, 7 to 10 pm
Castleberry Hill Arts in the Afternoon: Saturday, October 29, 2 to 5 pm

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce the premiere Southeastern solo exhibition of the photographs of Toni Hafkenscheid. The Dutch-born, Toronto based artist will show work from his “Landscape” series, a body of work in which Hafkenscheid has effectively obscured the borders of Objectivist reality.

Although Toni Hafkenscheid’s “Landscape” photographs depict actual landscapes, they create the illusion of model train sets or architectural maquettes. The images are arrived at solely through the use of in-camera focus and exposure techniques. Through an extremely shallow depth of field and meticulous lighting conditions, not to mention the artist’s own gifts of mise-en-scene and drama, Hafkenscheid has developed an almost magical ability for shrinking a life-sized and complicated modern world into fascinating, oblique little dioramas of an idealized American dream.

Hafkenscheid indicates the childhood influence of toy model sets on his work: how a particular vision of the landscape in a certain light will remind him of the train sets he played with as a child, and how playing with that miniature reality could almost feel like playing God. More significantly, the artist is concerned with the way photography as an art form is able to affect so convincingly the appearance of “reality.” Hafkenscheid considers this virtual sleight of hand to be “the most fascinating aspect” of the photographic medium. As a consequence, Hafkenscheid says he finds himself compelled to “explore what constitutes fact and fiction in a photograph by trying to blur the limits” between reality and illusion. This idea is what leads Hafkenscheid to seek out iconic imagery, and to carefully control his camera angles to avoid the intrusion of any overly specific modern detail. It is also what leads him to expose his photographs in such a way as to affect a certain color-saturated look suggestive of aged postcards.

Each element in Hafkenscheid’s photographs serves to depict an imaginary vision of a bygone American Dream that has begun to seem impossibly beyond our grasp. Whether this vision is being shown to us in memoriam, or rather with a measure of ironic reserve, is left for the viewer to decide.

Born in Rotterdam in 1959, Toni Hafkenscheid graduated from Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam) in 1989. He lives and works in Toronto. Hafkenscheid has received several Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council awards and has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and in New York, Chicago, Amsterdam and Tokyo. Collections include the Canadian Museum for Contemporary Photography, Kodak France, Kodak Netherlands, and the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art (NY).