Photographer Kristopher Grunert has an obvious eye for taking the (literally) concrete and making it ethereally beautiful. Listen to how exquisitely Grunert explains the passion behind his work: “The engineering, the placement of lights, steel, and concrete – someone, somewhere, poured their efforts into these creations and my objective is to show the beauty that exists there. To me, they are as magnificent as a constellation of stars.”
I feel an affinity for his work because our lives have had a similar trajectory – Grunert was born and raised in Saskatchewan (as was I), and like me he followed a need to create to another side of Canada; his photography led him to Vancouver, where he’s now based. I think that explains another part of why I love his work so much. Growing up in the prairies, you learn a different way to see. There’s not always a lot going on, and so, if you’re artistically inclined, you inherently train you train your eye to dig deeper for subtleties that others might pass over.
I think that’s how, though his subject choices seem at first cold and impersonal – highways, factories, empty parks (all at night), he inevitably captures the light around these solids at the perfect moment. The instant a car’s tail light creates a streak of colour he captures it in parallel to the bridge it’s crossing. As the effluence of a mist fills a highway, he takes the halos of light from the street lamps and finds the moment where he can balance these growing circles and cones in perfect symmetry.
The base of the shots are the industrialized world we’ve created, but I feel like he also uses the energy of nature – qualities of light, the weight of air – to somehow highlight both the invisible geometric structures that have always existed in nature, but also the softness and humanity given to concrete and steel when humans touch it and bring it to their use.
For his Viaduct(s) installation, he mounted several misty blue shots from that series and back-lit them. Imagine coming home into your darkened hallway and instead of flicking on a regular light, being greeted instead by these glowing works of art…
shape+colour 