Announcing the 2019 Optic Nerve Image Contest Winner​​: B. G-Osborne

B.G-Osborne is a Transmedia artist originally hosted on Treaty 20 territory (Anishinabewaki/Huron-Wendat land, Ontario) currently working in Tio’tia:ke (Kanien’kehá:ka and Huron-Wendat land, Montréal). They graduated from NSCAD University (Mi’kmaw land, Wabanaki Confederacy, Halifax) in 2014 with a BFA in Intermedia.

Osborne’s ongoing projects seek to address the complexities and revisionary potential of gender-variant representation/embodiment, and unpack their experiences with mental illness and well-kept family secrets. They place great importance in showcasing their work in artist run centres and non-commercial galleries across Turtle Island. ​

I continuously attempt to creatively unpack and share my relationships with fluctuating gender embodiment, white settler privilege, queerness, mental illness and family secrets. As a transmedia artist my practice is physically flexible while conceptually grounded in openness about my experiences and identity. Through my work and every-day interactions I aim to contribute to the growing repertoire of gender-variant narratives. My practice is concerned with using accessible mediums and materials to convey personal stories and encounters from a place of vulnerability.

“A Thousand Cuts” is a three-channel video montage of cisgender actors playing trans characters in popular film and television. The crescendo-like composition, leading from humorous to violent, barrages the viewer with the reality of the misrepresentation of trans identities and narratives. This ongoing misrepresentation gives the dominant culture an excuse to perpetuate physical violence against trans individuals–especially black trans women. “A Thousand Cuts” is part of a larger installation that is in progress and will include printed matter and sculptural components that will commemorate the thousands of trans people who have been taken from our communities. – B. G-Osborne

Honourable Mentions

Graham Wiebe is a photographer living and working in Winnipeg, MB. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the University of Manitoba.

Employing the snapshot as material toward a visual memoir, my photographic work is a record of impulse and engagement. The fragmentary and still documents weave together and highlight an intersection of urban and suburban landscape, creating an intimate portrait of culture rooted in time, place and personal experience. – Graham Wiebe

John Healey was born in Toronto, grew up along the St. Lawrence River in Brockville Ontario, and currently lives in Ottawa. John is a consumer electronics industry professional of more that thirty years, who now devotes himself to lens-based image creation.

My previous projects, such as HEAD-ON and Fasteners, grappled with disruptive personal events as inspiration for illustrating universal themes such as loss and relationship deterioration. This new body of work is a natural furtherance of my lens-based practice. After the self-examination context of the previous projects, Plastic Beach pivots the point of view and casts an outward-looking lens toward the continued polluting of one of our greatest natural resources. Consistent throughout the overall practice is the use of dark, jarring, and sometimes violent images to emphasize the deeper meaning within the work.

Plastic Beach looks to continue to draw attention to environmental issues just as the landscape photographers of the mid-20th century drew the attention of audiences with their beautiful visual creations. Current projects like Anthropocene by Burtynsky, Baichwal, and De Pencier examine the idea that the earth has entered into the human epoch, where it is reasoned that the affect of human activity is the most influential force shaping the environment. The audience of such work is given beautiful images as the gateway into ruinous surroundings. My project borrows from Anthropocene, and other previous environmentally-themed artworks, this idea of inviting the audience into the work with beauty, but instead of grand scale subjects shot in-situ, Plastic Beach magnifies the evidence of human polluting of freshwater resources by showing us the stuff right under our own feet. It confronts us with the beauty of the very thing with which we are unwittingly poisoning the environment and ultimately ourselves. – John Healey

BlackFlash Magazine’s annual Optic Nerve Image Contest is open to emerging Canadian photography and video-based artists. The contest is adjudicated anonymously, on merit only, by a jury of artists and arts professionals from across Canada. The primary goal of the Optic Nerve Image Contest is to provide an opportunity for emerging artists for peer assessment and publication in an internationally disseminated magazine.