Finally the 1st Art catalogue has arrived from BMO. It shows the artwork of the winning artists between 2003 and 2007 from all across Canada. I'm happy to see that there are more winning photographs from Emily Carr Institute. The original project I submitted that was chosen as the national winner in 2005 is described in this entry. You can see more detailed images here as well.

I thought I'd show some more from this series. When I was working on this series I was thinking a lot about borders and boundaries because we're always surrounded by them. My Dad recently reminded me about how borders are changing with his example about the Schengen Area. The Czech government is notifying people that soon it will become part of this border-free zone in Europe. More on the Schengen Area.

When I was a child, I once had to stay behind while my parents went to visit relatives in Germany. This was just in case they thought of escaping from the Czech Republic. The borders were very strict and travelling anywhere meant you needed to have permission to do so. When we moved to Canada we were all so happy that we could just drop by the border and go the the United States. These days the situation is changing in Canada.

This work is part of an ongoing series of photographs using forensic photography and a sort of surveillance photography to create mosaics resembling a police fingerprint database. I am using my own custom made software to create the final images. Each final image has a corresponding "straight" fence photograph and a processed fingerprint image.

This software uses Mark Probst's Metapixel to recreate digital images using thousands of thumbnails or image fragments in a mosaic.