Sergei Petrov

For thirty years Sergei Petrov has been on a journey. It is partly a journey through time and space - from his original home in Russia, through Western Europe and especially France, then to North America and his present home on Pender Island. But Sergei's journey has also been aesthetic, pursuing images through media that have themselves evolved over this thirty-year span.


Sergei began working within the idiom of the classic tradition of photography. His image "˜Lady on the Red Square' (1983) has rightly become iconic, reproduced internationally in many different forms and places. Rather than simply pursue further work in this idiom, Sergei chose to move on in his abiding ambition to "˜capture the moment.' He did not confine his work to the techniques traditionally employed in photography but instead sought means of harnessing novel technologies in capturing and reproducing visual images. The growing possibilities opened up by the development of digital technology thus allowed him to pursue his aesthetic quest in new directions.


One obvious way in which Sergei's work has changed, as his journey has progressed, has been a shift from representational to more abstract works. As well as the image in itself, the technical mean...