Karina Kraenzle : following up

Karina Kraenzle was with us for the first week of the residency. As I mentioned in my previous post, she was here along with Barbara Cuerden, sharing their work space and providing each other with feedback while taking short pauses here and there to enjoy but also document the landscape surrounding The Cottage.

Karina actually worked on two projects while she was here. One of them was recently exhibited at Blink Gallery in Ottawa. I was able to visit the exhibition on its last day, as the exhibitions at Blink Gallery usually run from Thursday to Sunday.

I've always liked the Blink Gallery space. There's something very appealing about this small heritage building, that still manages to offer a decent amount of white wall space. A lot of artists might think that a small space is less intimidating, but I would arguably say that it's quite the contrary : you can easily overcrowd and/or create work that is too large, either in size or in personality.

In this sense I found that Karina's photo series was perfect for the space. Neatly framed with photos all sharing the same dimensions of (approximately) 5" x 5", the photos were taken with an Ipad placed against the window of a moving train, capturing rainy days, bright lights, wispy trees and open fields. What really struck me was the way the lights painted the landscape, creating bright red lines across her compositions or dotting the sky with white specks and droplets, contrasting the seemingly more natural surroundings. Karina told me she has thousands of these photographs, taken with multiple cameras on various trips : the ipad created an aesthetic that was perfect for the small format photos, but also for capturing the blurriness of time passing.

Karina is a member of the Blink Gallery Collective. The exhibition season is done for the year but their call for proposals will be going out in February, offering programming for the spring and summer seasons. You can visit her website here, and the Blink Gallery website here, to discover Karina and other members of this Ottawa collective.