Pictures from My Neighbourhood (or, This is how I see)

Photographic works by Kristen Morin
May 6 - May 29, 2016
Opening reception Friday May 6, 6-9pm

Eighteen views of an alleyway near my house
(or, I remember rain)
2016
Photomontage printed on acrylic
24 x 32 inches

Since the first darkroom manipulations of photographs, their veracity as authentic documents has been debated. Physical evidence is rarely as enlightening as an accurately portrayed emotional tone. We could even argue that we often remember the emotion of a situation far more deeply than the details of the event itself.

Kristin Morin uses digital photography to explore the emotion of situation through the architecture and space of the places we inhabit. Morin cuts, combines and re-assembles her images to create spatially complicated portraits and landscapes that explore the notion of how we see, rather than focusing onwhat we see.

For her first solo exhibition in New York, Kristin has curated a collection of works shot in and around her neighborhood in Toronto.

Some are presented as I shot them. Others I have manipulated digitally to create a fiction – a new reality based on a feeling or mood I wish to exaggerate. These photomontages are made from several – sometimes up to 20 – angles of a space that I have stitched together in Photoshop. This process is obsessive and painstaking but it allows me to create a space I could not otherwise see but can still imagine is real. 

Kristin Morin hopes that these images act as "visual meditations." Through her work, the artist asks if the viewer has an emotional connection with the image, if the viewer imagines a narrative, and if the objects presented were sentient,
"What would they be thinking?"

Kristen Morin is an artist from Toronto, Canada. She’s been making art since 2002 using drawing, installation and photography to explore visual perception. She often uses tricks of perspective and distortion to invite alternate or conflicting views. Ultimately, her images and writing serve as pedagogy: She wants to teach people how to see.