NEXT: Stephen Waddell – Dark Matter Atlas

Over the past two decades the Vancouver-based artist Stephen Waddell has become widely known for his photographs and paintings that address urban space, particularly his depictions of the human figure in the modern city. This exhibition will feature a recent body of photographs in which Waddell has departed dramatically from the subject matter of his previous work by focusing on underground caverns in the United States, Canada and Lebanon—spaces once inaccessible that are now public parks. Printed to a large scale using traditional silver gelatin materials, Waddell’s surreal and compellingly beautiful pictures expand upon conventional conceptions of landscape while recalling photography’s relationship to Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which appearances are mistaken for reality.