Alison Rossitter

               The most recent lecture at the at the University of Lethbridge Art Now Series featured work of photographer Alison Rossitter. Rossitter has been working in photography for close to forty years beginning her journey at the Banff Center School of Fine Arts. She has also taught and worked commercially throughout her career. She began her exploration of photography through photograms. The body of work that developed was a series of books arranged on paper and exposed to different amounts of light. The photograms produced interesting visual textures, Alison explains “I am hoping the sum of the image is more than the sum of itself, and I am interested in how one thing leads to another.” I found particularly interesting how she used to title of the books as the title of each work giving this object a completely different visual experience expressed and captured though photography.

            Following this series Alison began using a flashlight to generate blind couture drawings. The flashlight was used to draw animals, in particularly horses which lead to looking at the role they played in art history. She began to incorporate horses from historical representation in art work creating images that referenced such poses but completely removed all contexts in which they were first conceived. You are left as a viewer with the image of a horse but rather nothing to link its origin or history. Alison soon found that by flooding the image of the horse with light she was able to achieve a more even blending of tonality. This allowed the image to have more depth and contrast between the light and dark tones. This constant experimentation leads Alison to her most recent study and focus for her current work.

            The photography as Alison quotes “peaked in the early nineteen seventies” this was a time when many types and formats of printing paper were available. Today with the insurgence of the digital format many if not all of these once plentiful varieties of printing paper are just not available today. Thanks to ability of the Internet and its ability to connect people from all around the world, Alison has made it her personal mission to seek out and collect fragments and sometimes full boxes of discontinued and expired printing paper. The work that I found most interesting was when Alison was able to expose various sheets of this expired paper to light and discovered different sets of finger prints. Sometimes these exposures could be traced back to dates as early as nineteen nineteen. This ability as an artist to bridge the past and the present with a single visual experience is what I find most successful in her work. The mark of the artist intrigues Alison and she explains “I enjoy this sense of connection with the past.”

            Finally, during this contemporary time in the history of photography Alison is looking to the past in an attempt to bring a new context to a medium that has gone through many periods of change. Creating successful works of art in Alison's mind, she states is “creating no boundary or rules when dealing with photography, you never know what you are going to find and I can’t help but be interested in this idea of photo conversation.” For anyone who is interested in contemporary photography I would highly recommend her work, and she is a great example of an artist today constantly pushing the boundaries within her field and the use of her medium.