The exhibition is a survey spanning the 1980’s to the present day and celebrate Canadian artist Anglea Grauerholz, winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Photography award. More than seventy works, in atmospheric black and white, sepia and colour evoke the artist interest yet unreliability of cultural memory- in her words, “a kind of amnesia, a vague recollection of something that can be conjured up , triggered by an event or site, but remained blurred.” A recurrent theme in Grauerholz’s work addresses the specific architecture and distinctive display modes of archives, museums and libraries, questioning their authoritative and traditional representations.
Grauerholz’s interests in women’s art through her early portraits and how her status as an immigrant, born in Germany, influenced her stylistic preferences. Her black and white or sepia toned photographs are characteristically blurred or out of focus, which brings a visual intensity to the work and also illustrates her preoccupations with the concept of time.
As a whole, Grauerholz’s work invites analysis and, in a dialectic of presence and absence, raises the questions that hide beneath the obvious.Angela Grauerholz, photographer (b at Hamburg, West Germany 10 Jan 1952.) A graduate in graphic design of the Kunstschule Alsterdamm in Hamburg, she also studied literature and linguistics at the University of Hamburg, and received a Master’s degree in photography from Montréal’s Concordia University in 1980. She has lived in Montréal since 1976.