Lot 33

Laura Jane Petelko is a Toronto-based photographer whose work explores perception, emotion, and the space between visibility and obscurity. Charged Air is part of a bidy of work inspired by the Japanese concept of Ma, emphasizing negative space—not as absence, but as the charged interval between things that gives form its meaning.

Created during the pandemic lockdowns, the series was developed in collaboration with dancers from the National Ballet of Canada and multidisciplinary artists. Using deliberate in-camera abstraction, Petelko creates images in which figures emerge from and dissolve into light, not as documentation but as felt experience. Shaped by a period in which she faced the prospect of losing her sight, the work strips away visual information in order to preserve what she considers most essential: emotional truth. Ma asks who holds the gaze, and what becomes visible when feeling takes precedence over fact.