Adam Vollick’s spacey Niagara
He has hung out with Neil Young and Daniel Lanois. He filmed Justin Timberlake’s last tour. He’s making a movie with Daryl Hannah.
But when Adam Vollick needs a jolt of inspiration, he just takes a quiet walk around his Queenston neighbourhood. It brings him back to his youth growing up on a farm in Canfield, soaking up every sight and sound. He didn’t fully appreciate it until years later.
“When you’re a teenager, you just think everything ’s happening everywhere else,” he says. “Once I got out into the big bad world and saw more of it, I realized just what my upbringing gave me. The peacefulness, the centredness that comes from being close to nature.
“It really recharges my batteries to have a nice, quiet place to come home to.”
Even better when he can combine home and work. Since January, a series of his experimental still photos taken around Niagara have been on display at Backhouse restaurant in Niagara-on-the-Lake. An opening reception will be held May 2 starting at 6 p.m.
The dreamlike photos offer a surreal glimpse of the region, like scenes you glimpse out of the corner of your eye then can’t find again. It’s an effect Vollick started using in college, trying to recapture the feeling of watching the scenery pass by during his morning bus rides to school.
Inspired by Ansel Adams and Jackson Pollock, the abstract photos create the effect of constant motion, which he calls ‘spacetime paintings.’
“The crux of it is really from right around my neighbourhood, taken pretty much last year,” he says.
Vollick visited Backhouse last year and was “digging the food” of the acclaimed restaurant when he asked about the art on the walls. He was referred to proprietor Bev Hotchkiss, who thought his images would pair up with the restaurant’s ‘cool climate cuisine’ created by husband Ryan Crawford, formerly of the Stone Road Grille.
It’s a brief reprieve home before Vollick heads back to L.A. to continue his work with Neil Young, who co-stars in his collaboration with Daryl Hannah he describes as a “post-apocalyptic western fantasy musical.”
It was his work with Young which caught the attention of Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who asked Vollick to work on his recent musical projects, including an American Express Unstaged special with Kenny Chesney and the concert film Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids.
Like much of Hollywood, Vollick was crushed by Demme’s death Wednesday.
“He was a real mentor, like a father figure to me,” he says. “He made everybody feel important. He invited people to rise to the occasion. To lose such a visionary, who was so zen about his art, it was a real shock.” jlaw@postmedia.com