Hello Everybody!

First of all, I want to send out a great big thank you. I want to thank my family and friends for always supporting my artistic endeavours. It’s not always easy to stay motivated when you’re trying your best to develop your skills as an artist while simultaneously getting a university education and trying to support yourself and all the while building a small business from scratch. Becoming a successful professional artist/photographer is no small feat and I’ve certainly had lots of high points and low points over the past four years. It can, at times, be difficult to stay motivated and positive to continue to work towards bigger and better things, but the love and support of my friends and family have certainly been one of my strongest motivations.

I want to also thank all of the brides and grooms who invited me to witness, experience and capture one of the happiest, most exciting days of their lives thus far. The trust you’ve all placed in me to both experience your wedding days with you and to capture them is a real honour to me.

In addition to all of my clients, I can’t forget to thank everybody who frequents my website and/or twitter and facebook updates. There’s a lot of you that I don’t know personally or see very infrequently and this is really the only way I can show my appreciation to all of you out there. Thanks for your support.

Now that all that mushy stuff is taken care of, I want to update you about what I’ve been up to since I stopped posting my wedding blogs. I’m currently a little more than halfway through my final year of the four-year photography studies BFA program at Ryerson University. I’m creating two bodies of work for my thesis.

The first, which I started in September and finished in December is a multimedia piece called First Impressions, wherein a created series of photographic portraits, photographed and manipulated to appear as if drawn caricatures, highlighting specific identity traits of each subject (of their choice). Each portrait was paired with a video interview, wherein each subject speaks about the way they perceive their identity to be perceived by others, upon a first impression. The piece speaks about identity and how stereotypes can often warp the perception of our own identities and the identities of others. View the final presentation of the piece: First Impressions by Ben Lariviere

In December, I was selected to exhibit a photograph in Full Frame at IMA Gallery, which was purchased during the buyer’s preview and awarded me an honourable mention for the Best in Show Award, guest-judged by the distinguished Maia-Mari Sutnik, Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This was, no doubt, a much-needed confidence boost, after a long and difficult first semester. The photo, “Union,” is part of a multimedia piece I created in third-year, “public’SPace.” The piece pairs images of typically hustling-and-bustling locations in Toronto’s downtown core in a unfamiliar moment of calm with audio clips of those locations at rush hour. I will add that piece to my website once I figure out how best to present it online.

This semester, I’m working on a new photo series, wherein I will be recreating particular memories of moments in my subjects’ lives as accurately as their memories are able to recall. This project is very much in the beginning stages, but will be ready to present at the end of the semester, in April.

I’m also exhibiting at MaxEx, at The Gladstone Hotel at the end of April. I will post more information about that on my facebook and twitter as it gets closer. I hope to see some of you there.

Again, thanks for all of your support and if you want to help even more, click the “like” button below or comment on this blog post.

–Ben