Nicholas Metivier Gallery is thrilled to present From Salmonier to Path End: New Works, an exhibition of photographs by Ned Pratt. There will be an opening reception with the artist in attendance on Saturday, March 22nd from 1-3PM. RSVP here.
On his drive from Salmonier to Path End along the Southern Coast of Newfoundland, Ned Pratt passes a grocery store, a gas station, and a singular restaurant. He knows the area well, and so engrained is the province’s visual language in his imagination that on occasion, he envisions photographs he might “find” before he’s even come across them. He sketches them quickly at home and then drives around in search of them. Even after finding them, Pratt will return to the location many times, waiting patiently for each element to line up just as he imagined them: clouds that are billowing rather than wispy, an expanse of sea that is flat and serene rather than choppy.
"Newfoundland gives you time. My familiarity and memories of places I knew as a child gives me time. I don't feel rushed to make observations in a landscape I love and know intimately. It is a landscape that is sometimes vast and foreboding and at other times gentle, but it is always sublime." - Ned Pratt
Pratt doesn’t photograph the province “as it is;” instead, his lens is guided by the way he sees the landscape before him. He organizes the world into line, form, and colour like a grid in a Mondrian painting. The result is a series of elegant, abstracted compositions with the sea, sky, and structures of Newfoundland deconstructed into formal elements. Pratt also collapses all sense of distance, bringing viewers directly up against a grid of his own creation. In Pratt’s hands, a quintessential image of Newfoundland becomes organised neatly into colour, shape, and line. Once there is a harmonious balance, Pratt deems the photograph complete and each element is locked into place. A hush falls over the image, and subsequently over his viewers as they look at it.
