Says Moira: Night-time has always appealed to me. The sun sets and the bustling city slows. People retire indoors to sleep and a hush falls over Toronto, Canada. Lights are turned on and the visual experience of a landscape setting, otherwise in darkness, is transformed. Unseen spatial relationships reveal themselves in the night lighting. While Toronto sleeps, I create my art. Driving around Toronto at night has led me to notice areas with intriguing ambient lighting. I try to isolate and preserve these scenes. I like to share landscapes that the public might not fully recognize. They may associate feelings of familiarity with the landscape, but only completely know the scene in daylight.
I create photographs of empty urban/suburban landscapes and experiment with nocturnal light studies. Nondescript landscapes are dramatized through careful composition and light balance. The packed Costco parking lot, or brimming city park, is captured after hours. Photos are shot after 12 AM to avoid having city activity crowd the frame. Usually a single ambient source provides the spotlight lighting for my photographs. Harsh orange incandescent lights are cooled to match the night’s temperature in my photo’s post digital manipulation. Lampposts are erased to create a surreal atmosphere. The sky and background are blacked out as the spotlight coaxes focus to the middle ground.
Moira Ness is an emerging photo-based artist specializing in urban landscapes. With a life long fascination for landscape photography and cinematography, Moira draws inspiration from artists such as Gregory Crewdson and Patrick Clair. Her current body of work, entitled “Nightscapes”, explores the Toronto area’s streets at night. In this series Moira photographs empty urban landscapes and experiments with utilizing ambient night-light. Moira has exhibited at The Los Angeles Center For Digital Art, Red Head Galley, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and The CICA Museum. She was a finalist for RMG Exposed 2016, a finalist and overall winner for the 2017 UNTAPPED Emerging Artist Competition for The Artist Project and a finalist for the SNAP! 2017 Photo Auction. She will be showing at The New Art Festival in Ottawa and has been accepted into the 2017 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. Moira will also be apart of Salon 44 2018 at Gallery 44 early next year. She will be showing her work at NordArt in Büdelsdorf, Germany in the summer of 2017.
Website: moiraness.com
