| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Aaron Falkenberg is a landscape photographer who grew up in rural Alberta. His father gave him a camera, a gift that shaped his life.
While he was highly influenced by the works of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, he realised midway into his career that he was reacting, in part, against the way that so many artists and cultural theorists conceived the Canadian countryside. “My first real strides towards an artistic understanding of my work,” says Falkenberg, “and what I feel the landscapes around me express came after a critical reading of Margaret Atwood’s Survival. Many representations of the Canadian landscape are either ridiculously bleak, or holdovers of a Romantic perspective, neither of which correlated with my experiences and perceptions of it.” Instead, his farm upbringing moved him to “express a beauty that is neither pristine nature, nor the utility of human incursions, but rather the space between the two: the rural.”
Falkenberg’s current devices of choice are a large format film camera for fine details in landscape, and a medium format camera with a reverse mount lens for maneuverability in awkward locations at high magnification. He then scans his negatives using an Imacon virtual drum scanner.
In addition to participating in several juried group shows such as Planet Earth at Calgary’s Leighton Arts Center, and Open Photo 2010 at Edmonton’s Kaasa Gallery, Falkenberg received Honourable Mentions at the Visions of Light group show at Open Photo 2008 Edmonton’s Harcourt House and at Red Deer’s Kerry Wood Nature Center (2010). He won the photography contests of Bow Cycle (2010) and the County of Wetaskiwin Jubilee Anniversary. Photolife Magazine named Falkenberg as one of Canada’s top Emerging Photographers (2008). His work dwells in the collections of the Arden Theatre, Alberta Health Services, the Robbins Health Care Pavilion, the Lois Hole Hospital, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. |