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Realms of the Unconscious
Marvin Gasoi

November 29, 1996 to January 9, 1997

Marvin Gasoi’s cibachrome prints were produced in 1981 when his major concerns shifted from the streets of New York and the recording of natural light situations, to the studio, where he began to experiment with light and form, conceiving of the “camera as easel, film as canvas, and light as the brush.”
 

In a series of works entitled “Realms of the Unconscious”, Gasoi began to combine his background in psychology with past experiences in video and performance art, in works that challenge the notions of painting, drawing and fine-art photography. In his exploration of the expressive possibilities of drawing on film with light, the artist chooses cibachrome as the ideal medium for color saturation, and devises his own light sources as tools to achieve brilliant, vibrant color. Unlike many of his peers working in “staged photography”, Gasoi’s subjects exist only at the time of shooting, injecting a temporal quality to the pieces that enhances their mystery. He appears himself, in many of the pieces, under various disguises. In others, household objects are presented as humorous or even, diabolical.

 

In subsequent work, Gasoi transformed magazine illustrations and book reproductions with his "light brushes", bringing them farther from their technical roots to a purely aesthetic experience, more photographic than photographs.
 
Marvin Gasoi was born in Montreal in 1949, lived in New York between 1978 and 1988, and has been living and working in Montreal since then. He has exhibited in group and solo shows in Canada, China, England, Japan, Mexico, New York, Holland and Poland.
 
His work appears in several public collections, including the Graham Nash Collection (USA), the International Center of Photography (New York), the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Chase Manhattan Bank, Air Canada and the Musée d’art contemporain permanent collection and also in different publications, including the 1981 Time-Life Photography Annual, Flora Photographica, Masterpieces of Flower Photography and 50 Years of Color Photography 1936-1986.
 
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