COLBORNE – He wakes at 5 a.m. daily to ascertain prospects of making a great catch (based on reports of temperature and cloud cover), then pulls on the winter gear if it looks promising and heads on out.
Most of us would miss the sight of the sun rising over the icy rocks on the Port Hope shore of Lake Ontario when the light is just that perfect. Bill Hornbostel offers us an opportunity to enjoy his view without any of the chilly discomfort in his upcoming show of new photographs at the Colborne Art Gallery entitled The Lake in Winter and Other Vistas.
Hornbostel left a brief stint at a PhD program studying Roman North Africa four years ago to pursue life full-on as a photographer. In these few years of active artistry, he has become a member of the Colborne Art Gallery and was selected to show work in Toronto at The Artist Project for the second year running. He is also a recipient of an Ontario Arts Council grant.
Hornbostel has been interested in computers and, for him, digital photography falls on the same technical trajectory, as a digital camera is essentially that, a computer. He finds that photography also naturally extends early interests in paint and charcoal. I have always found that vision trumps technology though, and his passion for geology and the landscape transcends this dogged work to art photography. The work he achieves offers that nebulous something that many reach for when clicking their shutters, but few attain.
Once he went to Iceland to capture the strange rugged rocks alongside sparsely populated human development. Here in Canada he most enjoys our winter landscape.
The work that is nearly ready for the Colborne Gallery show will also reveal recent experimentation with photographic presentation. Hornbostel has been laminating epoxy resin on to the images, protecting the photograph as it allows us greater psychological access to it (he noticed that frames and glass sometimes place more distance between viewer and image than he finds to be ideal).
The Lake in Winter and Other Vistas runs at the Colborne Art Gallery from March 9 through April 14. An opening reception with the artist present will be held on March 9 from 2 to 4 p.m. All are welcome to attend.
– Annie McDonald