Photographie argentique imprimée à la main, 2024
Night Sky – Chemical Burn is part of an ongoing body of work in which Bauer explores the invisible through analog processes. Created using peel-apart film, the image is shaped by a process that yields both precision and unpredictability. Its distinctive aesthetic emerges through chemical irregularities, including haze, veiling, and organic marks that form during development. In this work, these unpredictable reactions create a pattern reminiscent of the night sky or the Milky Way, as if a cosmic field has surfaced within the image itself. These traces evoke a spectral presence, suggesting something beyond immediate perception.
Lorna Bauer utilizes photography and sculpture to examine humans’ relationships with their surroundings. Her projects are site-related, resulting in works that respond to specific places and contexts and engage in material and visual investigations of ideas and experiences generated by the ecologies of lived environments.
Bauer’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibi- tions in Canada and internationally, notably at a Kunstverein (Dresden), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Fonderie Darling (Montréal), Franz Kaka (Toronto), Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery (Athens), and Arsenal Contemporary (New York). Her work is held in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. She is the recipient of the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for Photography (2019), was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award (2021), and received the Gattuso Prize (2024).