Working with film and photography, Osheen Harruthoonyan has come to prominence in recent years with a number of exhibitions featuring his disquieting black and white photographs. Although addressing different genres of photography, from landscape to portraiture, the primary subject of Harruthoonyan’s work is the subconscious and the metaphysical perception of reality.

Born in Tehran to Armenian parents, Harruthoonyan is currently based in Toronto, after moving to Canada with his family in 1987. Having studied film and worked as a set designer in number of commercial projects, Harruthoonyan dedicated himself to photography since 2003. The close association with cinema comes through in his photographs which often take the form of condensed and frozen movements across time and space. Utilizing re-photography, chemical effects and double exposures, Harruthoonyan’s series ‘Saw the Splendour’ and ‘Uchronie Fragments’ create imaginary landscapes where shards from reality form entirely new perceptual possibilities.

This alternative, or parallel space, is the space of photography, which in Harruthoonyan’s works is equated with dreamscapes. As the artist has said in a 2012, ‘for me, process becomes product’. In every photograph, the viewer is aware of the medium’s ‘body’ – the grain and the emulsion of the film, the spill of the chemicals, the negative exposures that literally turn the real inside out. Even when his photographs depict specific places, such as his Armenian suite ‘The Black Garden’, the resulting images resist our desire for specificity and linearity. These are peripheral visions where boundaries that define reality are pried open.

Echoing masters of surrealist and symbolist photographers such as Man Ray and Minor White, Harruthoonyan’s works allow memory and subconscious to play out infinite variations on what we perceive as ubiquitous in nature and culture.