Mark Filipiuk Szko&#0322a | School

Toronto and Krakow-based Mark Filipiuk interconnects imagery using digital, brush, and collage techniques. Through the representation of young people, the photo-based works attempt to locate a typology of personalities as they are just beginning to emerge into adulthood. Mounted on metal panels are multiple composites of adolescent youth in the institutional setting of a high school, created from in-camera editing and post-production digital techniques. The ambiguity between the virtual and the real manifests in an image that appears to mimic a painterly style, yet remains rooted in photography. Merging drawing, painting, and collage, the final portraits present subjects who are willfully present yet remain just out of reach in their individuality. The haunting, sparse images are imbued with a psychological charge informed by Filipiuk’s 25-year career as an educator and an observer of what Nirvana singer and songwriter Kurt Cobain called “Teen Spirit.”

Curated by Stuart Keeler.