Wealth in Dave Wise’s world passes through a flat tire

Dave Wise could not speak until he was 3 years old, so his father bought him a camera and the boy learned to communicate in this way. What do they say about the exchange rate between words and pictures?

Even as a child, he took pictures with this camera, many pictures, and helped his parents understand him when he had no words.

From then on, David, a soft-spoken and thoughtful man, had a lot to say. Not always in words, but in words too.

He ended up learning them. Learn to speak and write, of course. He wrote a lot of travel journalism, poetry, several books (some in collaboration with British musician/artist/writer Billy Childish) and learned to run. David has been the Canadian 24 Hour Marathon Champion twice, in 2016 and 2017 (he ran 120 miles in 24 hours).

All of this—extreme running, traveling, writing, photographing, history, thinking, “the way”—all of this, everything, and its character, somehow seems to be there, implied, or through some kind of shadow language that pulsates through the images. Stunning new show. It’s called Pinhole Pilgrimages, at You Me Gallery, 330 James N.

It’s an appropriate address. David seems to have this quality, like a pilgrim—a seeking traveler, a traveler, a climber of unfettered roads, destined for places that are, well, less holy than holy, or rather especially meaningful and transcendent. What the pilgrim finds.

He slept on the floor of the Sahara Desert and walked hundreds of miles at a time across several continents.

In this view there are images of the Temple of Zeus in Greece, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the pyramids and the Eiffel Tower, just like you’ve never seen them before, but also many everyday images of people in villages, herons in a swamp, long exposures of evocative scenes and the sun racing across the sky For four months, taken from Dave’s house on Ferguson Street in Hamilton.

“It’s the process, not the image at the end,” David says of the rewards, challenges, and surprises of this special series of images called wormholes.

It’s pretty much my first photoshoot. It includes a simple camera, which is a photoresist box with no lens but instead a pinhole-sized aperture. Light from the lens passes through the aperture as a mirror image projection of the lens on the other side of the box. It was recorded on photosensitive paper.

“As soon as I got to Toronto, I took a selfie,” says Dave, who was born and raised in Kent, England.

“I visited the garden about three months ago, doing meditation there. The resulting image from the waist up took a wonderful turn. His head was gone.

“Somehow my self was disappearing,” Dave laughs, a kind of introspective point.

This is the pinhole photography for you. There is so much that cannot be reliably predicted or planned in the design and creation of an image, so much spontaneity and the likeness of a world that lifts an image of itself to the photographer and the audience.

“It’s a collaboration with the unknown,” says Dave.

Although he has always been into photography, his time has been immersed in the exciting Medway scene around Medway Towns, North Kent, England since the 1990s, with Billy Childish and other artists, writers and musicians, who introduced him to piercings.

He, Childish, and others at this time founded Open Fox Press, which resulted in several publications.

It’s one of the many chapters in Dave’s exciting and eventful life as an extroverted and energetic scholar on the road, a life that sees him traverse France to join the French Foreign Legion. Travel around the world by canoe, horseback and even public transport. Along the way, he’s run dozens of marathons and worked on projects to help various conservationists, is an avid vegan chef, has practiced yoga and meditation since 2016, and completed his own yoga instructor course in Toronto in 2019.

It’s also a life, almost cut short in the early 2000s when he was beaten up on the streets of Kent – ‘Gentle Kent’, as he calls it – in a totally random attack, connected to a football (soccer) match. His spleen ruptured, he had a 20% chance of survival and spent months in the hospital.

He says it took a long time to deal with the psychological effects. It has become a barrier between me and the richness of life. I knew I had to stop doing this. »

Dave moved to Canada to be with his partner, first to Toronto and more recently to Hamilton.

Dave says of the nature and form of pinhole photography in this exhibition, in which he has included his paintings:

“For me, it’s an intimate process. For me,[les photos perçantes]It looks tacky when it’s too long. »

Offer valid until (inclusive) Tuesday 9th May. On Friday May 12th, You Me Gallery is celebrating the opening of recent works by Hamilton artists Sandra Crisante (sculpture) and Ravinder Ruprai (painting), from 6-9pm.

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