Wes Bell: Snag

Snag emerged from a moment of profound personal reckoning.

This exhibition with Wes Bell (Dip '80, Photography and BDes '11, Photography) is an official participant in Vancouver's Capture Photography Festival in April.

Snag emerged from a moment of profound personal reckoning. During a long drive across the windswept prairies of Alberta, shortly after saying goodbye to his mother, who was dying of cancer, Wes Bell became captivated by the eerie presence of shredded plastic bags tangled in barbed-wire fences along the road. Whipped relentlessly by the wind and slowly torn apart, these fragments became potent metaphors for grief, mortality, and the suspended space between holding on and letting go.

Arranged in a continuous linear sequence along the gallery wall, the unbroken progression of twenty-four identically sized and framed photographs mirrors the flat, expansive prairie landscape – especially as it appears in the stark season between winter and spring. In this transitional time, the land feels stripped of vitality, rendered in muted, almost monochromatic tones that echo the emotional barrenness often experienced in mourning. The horizontal flow of images reinforces the monotonous openness of the Prairies, emphasizing the raw, lonely simplicity of the work. 

Using tactile analogue techniques, the materials heighten the physical presence of the images and underscore themes of erosion and impermanence, both in the land and in the emotional terrain the work inhabits. By avoiding digital processes, Bell preserves a sense of weight and authenticity that digital imagery cannot replicate. Snag stands as both meditation and memorial – a quiet, resonant exploration of fragility, transition, and the subtle ways loss reveals itself in the overlooked edges of the world.