Oliver Pauk

Snow Days Exhibition
Oliver Pauk’s Feb 24th Documentation

For my snow day I decided to take a walk down to the lake. I wanted to explore the cusp where the land meets the water and see how it all looked at this time of year. This map shows the path that I walked: from High Park down to the lake and then all the way across to Leslie on the east side. I ended up taking the TTC home because after 10 hours of walking I was pretty tired. Click on the flags to see some of the photos I snapped along the way.


View Snow Days – Oliver Pauk in a larger map

Bio

Oliver has been involved in the arts since a young age, but photography has always been, for him, the most peaceful and serene of these practices. His work was first shown at Akin Collective (the shared art studio that he founded in 2008) for Contact Photography Festival in 2009. Since then Oliver has continued dedicating more and more time and thought towards the development of his personal style. The generic and typically ugly structures, which he photographs can be seen in a new light where the focus is solely on the colours, shapes and patterns that make up our surroundings.

oliverpauk.com

 

Motivation

In coming across the information for the Snow Days project, hosted by Labspace, I was immediately inspired by the improvisational nature of the idea. The thought of spending a day allowing myself to move and change direction based simply on my emotions and artistic inclinations sounds beautiful. I am someone whose days are always quite active and varied as I have several pursuits that keep me busy. These include playing sax with the band Make Your Exit, running the Akin Collective art studio, building repurposed furniture as well as managing investment portfolios, creating projection art, importing vintage Swiss military bags and practicing photography. I have been casually active in taking photos since I was a child, but nowadays this is starting to become the glue between all that I do. I almost always have my camera with me so that I can entertain myself by shooting on the way from my band studio, to my art studio, to my woodshop and back home. The fact that I use my bicycle year round to travel the city is definitely a main factor on my mood and lifestyle; with much of this impact coming directly from weather and temperature on a day-to-day basis. I find it interesting to observe how these forces affect me as well as those around me, whether friends, family or strangers on the street. For me to dedicate a day to focus on these factors would allow me to make observations that would surely affect the way that I do what I do. The content of my photography would be affected as would be the general spirit with which I create music, not to mention my daily dealings with the artists at my studio and with people everywhere else along the way. I am specifically interested to see how being a part of the Snow Days project could affect the photos I take. In the past, many of my favorite photos have come from evening and night shoots, but I am currently in the process of dedicating myself to further developing my daytime photography in order to become a more versatile and creative photographer. This could be a great opportunity for me and would certainly be a very interesting and introspective experience.