represent

Dushka Vujovic

Photography by Dushka Vujovik

This is an unusually lyrical photograph for Dushka Vujovik, whose typical subjects are abstract geometric color compositions created by simply cropping what she sees in her urban environment in Toronto, just a few miles north of us down here on the bottom of Lake Ontario. When she wants to be, as a photographic coloriest, she is a rare bird. Her pallet is restrained–seriously, how much radiant color can one find on the walls of buildings in Toronto or any large city?–but somehow she discovers geometrically arranged fields of beautiful color everywhere around her. In other words she has the core skill of a creative talent: to actually see what’s there rather than what you habitually think is there. She also passes along touches of humor wherever she finds it, and her recent posts have been of the natural world. You can see her marvelous color sense here in this photograph: it’s a quiet little melody with a fine simple drum beat off to the side, courtesy of those fences. You almost can’t lose with Virginia creeper in the mix. As a representationalist obsessed with how to make color central to my work, I’m always impressed by how she achieves that with a camera. Stuart Shils was doing something like this with his camera for quite a while on Instagram. Unlike his current paintings, which are all about color, his photographs found muted abstract compositions in the real; some were black and white. He was great at it, but moved on to the incredible paintings he does now. (It takes a while to scroll down five or six years on his feed to find the photographs, he’s so prolific.) Love Vujovik’s posts. With my limited knowledge of Serbian art, she has to be my favorite Serbian artist after whoever painted the White Angel.