Garnet makes colour photographs which draw connections between the past and present of places, objects and people. Throughout his Master's degree, much of his research and production revolved around aspects of the historic and contemporary fur trade, today a largely taken-for-granted factor in determining the future of the territories now known as Canada. This research, which took him to modern-day fur auctions and some of the last remaining manufacturing ateliers in Montreal, eventually led him back to the ultimate holder of history - the land itself. The resulting images are contemporary representations of territories across "Canada," made at carefully chosen locations, which allude to the complicated social histories which have shaped them. In creating photographs, Garnet attempts to convey not only the present appearance of a landscape, place or object, but a sense of continual change and use through the passage of time. Photography is often thought of as dealing only with surfaces, yet appearances are often a result of a certain life cycle. Similarly in his work, he is interested in what new narratives can be derived from carefully-made photographs, and how viewers may read different things based on their own personal histories.
Garnet Dirksen is a photographic artist from Merritt, British Columbia. He holds a BFA from Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops, B.C.) and an MFA in Photography from Concordia University (Montréal, QC). He is the recipient of numerous awards including a Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create Grant, the Roloff Beny Foundation Fellowship in Photography and an SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Master's Scholarship. Recent exhibitions of his work include Social Studies at the FOFA Gallery vitrines (Montréal, QC), Postscripts, at the Crowsnest Pass Public Art Gallery (Frank, AB) and The Lind Prize group exhibition at the Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, BC).
