Musician takes photos of local songwriters
Songwriters, bullets, and Tanzanian schoolgirls: New photography shows about to open in Ottawa
Jamie Kronick is a musician: You can tell by the hair. It sits — stands — upon his head like a shocked but manicured bush. He looks like a young Tom Waits stepping out of a barbershop, set to be “walking Spanish down the hall,” as Waits sang.
The ’do is evidence of a mind that sees creativity as an attitude to be applied generally, into whatever opportunity arises. Kronick is an ubiquitous musician on the local scene — he currently plays drums and keyboards in a half-dozen bands, including Goodluck Assembly, Her Harbour and Keek — yet he is first a photographer.
It’s this confluence of experience that informs his new exhibition, The Songwriter. Kronick says he’s an outsider to the songwriting process, and the 20 portraits in The Songwriter are the tangible trail of his search for insight.
“So often I’m working with various songwriters on the songs that they write, and arranging them and producing them, but I never am there from the inception, because the songwriters always do that work alone, behind closed doors, kind of thing,” says Kronick, a graduate of SPAO in Ottawa. “It’s definitely a certain amount of curiosity for me to see the one aspect of songwriting that I’m not privy to myself.”
Kronick lined up people he knows in the music community — some as acquaintances, some by reputation — and shot them as they worked in their creative spaces.
It’s not a comprehensive survey of the city’s songwriting scene — for example, all the musicians in the exhibition are white — but it is an attractive look at a sector of the local music community at a given moment, particularly that part of it identified as “singersongwriter.” It’s also a reminder of the musical talent that toils in the Capital Region, perhaps most notably Kathleen Edwards, Jim Bryson, Ian Tamblyn, Rolf Klausener, Amanda Rheaume and Mike Dubue.
Kronick asked the musicians to relax or otherwise do what they do when writing music, and the results are intimate. Edwards, who recently moved back to the Ottawa area, sits on the floor, her feet in rainbow heels and a gorgeous, hollow-body Gibson guitar in her hands. Two large dogs sleep beside her, one with a tennis ball still clutched in its jaws. That dog looks more contented than does any other living creature I’ve ever seen.
Klausener, best known for his band the Acorn and as artistic director of the Arboretum Music Festival, sits in what appears to be a bedroom, the entire space cast in a diaphanous white light. Dubue — the vast, mercurial talent in the HILOTRONS — leans over a keyboard, with a background filled by a vintage table and shelf upon shelf of vinyl records.
Kronick says the project “demystified songwriting” for him. “A lot of them had a very sport approach to it, for lack of a better word, like it was something they’d exercise as if it was a muscle, where they would do it for half an hour a day, or once a week every Sunday — there would be some sort of regularity to it,” he says.
The exhibition happens Aug. 30 to Oct. 12 at the OAG Annex gallery in Ottawa City Hall. The official opening is 5:30 to 8 p.m., Sept. 4.
THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHER
Well, new to Ottawa, at least. Carrie Colton, the painter and the director of Studio Sixty Six in the Glebe, issued an open call to artists for a group exhibition titled The New Photographers. “To my astonishment, I received over 100 portfolios from across Canada and the United States,” Colton says. She faced the “luxurious problem” of whittling the field to only six photographers.
To date I’ve seen only a few of the photographs, and standouts come from Brady Simpson (no relation) and Julie Sent. Simpson, from Alberta, photographed a small diorama of tiny human figures working on a life-size bullet. It’s a sharply wry statement on North America’s obsession with guns, and wide open to interpretation.
Julie Sent is from Seattle, though her dark, moody still life with an octopus and saffron flower will look familiar to anyone who knows the paintings of Ottawa artist Alex Chowaniec, (especially the large painting that dominates Town restaurant on Elgin Street).
Also in the exhibition will be Troy Moth, of Vancouver, and Ottawa’s Jennifer Bouchard, Olivia Johnson and Saleena Wedderbum. The New Photographers opens Sept. 4, from 6 to 10 p.m., at Studio Sixty Six, at 66 Muriel St., and continues to Oct. 5.
TANZANIAN SCHOOLGIRLS
Sept. 4 is a busy day for photography in Ottawa. Also opening, at Exposure Gallery (1255 Wellington, above Thyme & Again) is E for Education.
Organized by Tembo — The Tanzania Education and MicroBusiness Opportunity — the exhibition features photographs taken by Tanzanian school girls who “held a camera for the first time.” A release says, “The photos allow a rare opportunity for the public to get glimpses of the culture and its values through the girls’ eyes.”
The exhibition continues to Sept. 17. The official opening is 5 to 7 p.m., Sept. 4.