SITE: Photographs by Timothy P. Ojile
January 11 - April 23, 2002

Honolulu artist Timothy P. Oijle was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and received a BA in Eastern Art History from the University of Minnesota. Ojile has exhibited at numerous local, national and international venues, including solo exhibitions at Gallery Cuore in Osaka, Japan; Keiko Hatano Gallery in Honolulu; and The Contemporary Museum.

While known primarily for his brightly colored paintings and drawings, in this exhibition Ojile presents a series of Polaroid photographs begun in 1997. In the Polaroid process, each print contains material embedded with crystals that polarize light. The camera internally develops a film negative, rapidly producing a print through the dye diffusion process. Ojile chooses this instant photographic process for both its immediacy and the raw, tactile quality of the images.

The exhibition comprises individual Polaroid prints depicting quotidian objects that the artist recontextualizes, through detail and grouping, to reveal comparisons, contrasts and meanings that may otherwise be overlooked. The artist states: “The universe is a gestalt of sites because the meanings of all sites change according to need. We decide what is meaningful from myriad choices.” Examples of Ojile’s subjects include pool floats, ocean debris, drag pipes, flowers, cranes and steamrollers. Each individual image, in itself and within its compositional grouping, acts as both a spatial and temporal “site.”