User:HeatherBlack/Yechel M Gagnon

Yechel M Gagnon ...

Profile http://jensennagle.com/cv/

“One thing I try to achieve is a painterly aspect in my work. It’s how I understand photography.

Intro Joshua Jensen-Nagle is recognized internationally for his painterly images, design aesthetic and innovative darkroom techniques. His distinctive images evoke Evoking memory, reverie or illusion, his distinctive images of elegant European palaces, sun-soaked beaches or skiers in mid-air have been published in Harper’s, Canadian Art, House & Home, and Air Canada enRoute. His work has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum (Boston), the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Glenbow Museum (Calgary), and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto), as well as at international art fairs and galleries across North America. His work is also found in many corporate collections including Cirque du Soleil, Transcontinental Inc., and McCarthy Tétrault LLP.

Jensen-Nagle creates images that blur the boundary between photography and painting. Evoking memory, reverie or illusion, his trademark atmospheric style is created through unique processing techniques from clothing dyes, paint splatters or fog machines. To communicate his message JN has experimented throughout his career, with imagery from postcards or natural history exhibits, to landscapes shot with pin-hole, polaroid or digital cameras. A design aesthetic permeates his work, from beach scenes shot from a helicopter to others enhanced by coloured circles – a playful homage to painter Damien Hirst.

Born in Washington, New Jersey, Jensen-Nagle first developed an interest in photography as a high school student. Inspired the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans, he attended Ryerson University, graduating in 2003 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Image Arts, Photographic Studies. His early series of beach scenes recreated from vintage postcards or dancing ballerinas recalled his childhood memories of the New Jersey shore and Stieglitz's documentary style. He first exhibited in Toronto galleries in 2004, and his cityscape image "Light Shifts" was featured in Canadian Art magazine in 2005. Turning to nature JN rephotographed deer, elk, or bears against a black background to express his concern for disappearing wildlife. One image "Delicate Hope" illustrated the Ghost Bear article published in the Calgary Herald's Swerve Magazine in 2006, another was displayed in the 2010 group exhibition "Natural History" at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. His respect for nature was also communicated in the "New Canadiana" wilderness series, photographed in Ontario and Newfoundland, published in Galleries West in 2010. For Jensen-Nagle the past has always inspired his work and Jensen-Nagle's white, otherworldly imagery of European architecture or dark interiors were published in both House & Home and Air Canada's enRoute magazine. Other series include downhill skiers seen as colourful dots from afar or closeups caught in midair as published in Harper’s Magazine in 2012. A world traveler, in recent years JN shot European beach scenes at eye-level as well as arial images of the Australian shoreline, many of which were published in the 2014 book "Joshua Jensen-Nagle". In 2015, photoimages by JN, Susan Dobson and Jason Gowans were featured in the exhibition The View from Here at the Art Gallery of Mississauga for the 2015 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Jenson-Nagle is a frequent exhibitor and over 30 solo shows of his work have been held across North America, including Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, San Diego, and Atlanta during one year alone. His work has also been exhibited at Art Miami Basel, Art Chicago, LA Art Show (Los Angeles), AAF Contemporary Art Fair (New York), Dallas Art Fair, and Toronto International Fair (TIAF). He has also been interviewed in art journals from Galleries West and Photo Life to George Stroumboulopoulos's online "Look at This", as well as in House & Home and, together with his wife handbag designer Jessica Jensen, in. Art reviewer Betty Ann Jordan described his work as: "Like an oft-told tale of embellished and distorted in the retelling, these altered pictures gain in allusive poetry what they forego in precise detail."* Gary Michael Dault Sault credit JJN for creating a new “territory that lies between conceptual playfulness and out-and-out risk”. He concluded: "His radicalism rests in his virtually alchemical transformation... of ordinariness, into the photographic uncanny."


 * Betty Ann Jordan, ‘’A Change of Place ‘ Recent Works by Joshua Jensen-Nagle Exhibition cataloge Galerie de Bellefeuille 2012.

Quotes
Beaches "Jenson-Nagle whiteness sears. It is not a whiteness found in nature, a sun-and-sand whiteness, but is, rather, a transfiguring whiteness." Gary Michael Dault, "Joshua Jensen-Nagle" (2014)

Achitecture / Interiors "Images are blurred, as if seen in a dream or memory, or simply shot quickly as the artist passed through on wider travels. But shot on Polaroid 600 film, the photographs take on a rich permanency." Jill Sawyer, Galleries West (Spring 2010)

"The baroque glare... is a presentation of the radiance of wonderment, the pearlescent shimmering of an all-encompassing engagement with timelessness." Gary Michael Dault, "Joshua Jensen-Nagle" (2014)

Landscape / Nature "It is only when you begin to find their hyper-colouration disturbing... that you begin to revel in the intense artifice that orders them." Gary Michael Dault, "Joshua Jensen-Nagle" (2014)

"Through layers of photographic manipulation, artist Joshua Jensen-Nagle succeeds in finding the ‘life’ in a taxidermy polar bear, photographically capturing one of the world’s largest beasts at a time when the species is threatened by extinction." Jennifer Rudder, Natural History exhibition, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (2010)

Early Work Jenen-Nagle is constantly developing news ways to attain his his pleasingly tactile, graining effects.'

Untrammelled sensuality is not often linked with pauseless forays into experimentation. It is all the more remarkable, then, to find these two wayward – and usually mutually exclusive – energies coming together to enrich Joshua Jensen-Nagle's large, opulent photographs. Gary Michael Dault, "Joshua Jensen-Nagle" (2014)

used in text "Like an oft-told tale of embellished and distorted in the retelling, these altered pictures gain in allusive poetry what they forego in precise detail." Betty Ann Jordan, "A Change of Place: Recent Works by Joshua Jensen-Nagle", Exhibition Catalogue: Galerie de Bellefeuille (2012)

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Short version
In 2014, a book of his photographs "Joshua Jensen-Nagle" was published.