| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Photographer Wendy Ehlers earned her Fine Arts Diploma at Okanagan University College (1977), her Bachelor Degree of General Studies at Simon Fraser University (1986), and her M.Ed. in Arts at the University of British Columbia (1989). She continued her training at the Alberta College of Art (1991), the Rocky Mountain School of Photography (1998), and courses with Bruce Barnbaum (1995, 2002).
Ehlers describes her work as searching “for elegance, purity, and mystery in organic structures,” and says that because she is “seduced visually by natural subjects that possess qualities ranging from subtle, undulating, surfaces to alluring curvatures and curls,” she attempts “to isolate and preserve these attributes in photographic form with the intention of triggering a response to the metaphoric potential that lies within them.” One iconic Alberta location that has seduced her is Writing-On-Stone Archeological Preserve, for which she produced a rare (for her) series of black-and-white photographs depicting the provincial park’s primordial petroglyphs and rock formations.
Ehler has mounted a dozen solo exhibitions, including Written on Stone at the University of Victoria’s McPherson Gallery, Gray Matter at Victoria’s Community Arts Council Gallery, and Ice and Stone at the Kootenay Gallery of Art. She won four scholarships and several project and travel grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council, and served two residencies at the Brewster Programme at Columbia Icefields in Jasper National Park (1998, 1999). The Alberta Foundation for the Arts has collected nine of her prints from the Writing-on-Stone and Ice and Stone series. |