Theresa Ma

escapes

These are the photographs I wanted to make when I was younger – the first time I saw something beautiful and wanted to stay in love forever. Is anything more immediately beautiful and easier to worship than landscapes and bodies? 

Landscape photography is a meditation on a beautiful scene we’re lucky enough to witness and document. It is about an external beauty and our internal wonder. A long trek with heavy equipment so that we might be worthy of the view. A row of photographers lined up at sunset to try their version of the snapshot. 

I’m first in line for you. Forehead and nose pressed against a curve. Hills and plains. Creek and soil. Everything beautiful reminds me of you.

This is a mirroring of the universal and individual in the practise of landscape and portrait photography — it’s both what is ours and what is mine.

Theresa is a self-taught artist shaped by every image they’ve ever seen and every idea they’ve ever read. She has a formal education in computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy from the University of Toronto, and has a professional background of aligning stakeholders and increasing shareholder value. 

She is interested in the web of multidisciplinary thought around what it means to be alive — boundaries between souls, qualia, intention, truth, interpretation — and what it means to be alive now with our generation’s particular existential anxieties and technological advances.

The work is driven by desire and ego — obsessions, fascinations, whims – and an exercise in attention and intention. She believes that if the work is good enough, some part of her may live in you, in a very real way.

Contact the artist directly for information on purchasing.

Contact: hello@theresa.ma
Website: tma (theresa.ma)
IG: @mapotato

May 15 to May 26th, 2024
918 Bathurst Street, Toronto
Sun and Star Rooms

Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12pm to 5pm
Opening reception: Thursday, May 16th from 6-9pm
Artist talk: Saturday, May 18th from 1-3pm