Aaron Friend Lettner Doorways
In this exhibition, Aaron Friend Lettner’s photo book Doorways becomes an interactive installation that explores the role of symbolism in storytelling. Offering fragments from the book’s printed form, the installation maintains its original spirit of mystery and transcendence. The book pages are disassembled and scattered behind a wall of doors, inviting the viewer to embark on their own journey as they reassemble the story, gather clues, and solve puzzles. Joining photographs and text, as well as materials from the bookmaking process itself, Doorways employs the language of dreams and the imagination as it circles through the past, allowing memories and materials to meet, converse, and, finally, to part.
A selection of work will also be on view at Earl Selkirk Gallery.
Aaron Friend Lettner makes unusual books. Working primarily with photography, Aaron traverses the crossways of culture, memory and place. His work is distinguished by its esoteric flair and he sees bookmaking as an opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration; a ritual act, where seen and unseen worlds elide. Alongside this, Aaron runs workshops with youth that consider different ways of telling a story through images, as well as hand-binding books. An intuitive bookmaker, Aaron received the inaugural Burtynsky Photobook Grant in 2016 for Doorways and a Canadian national book design award from the Alcuin Society in 2022 for anglepoise, which exhibited coast-to-coast across Canada, as well as in Japan and Germany. His books are held in special collections at the National Library of Germany (Leipzig) and The Rare Books Division of Simon Fraser University (Vancouver).