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2025 Verant Richards Award recipient Aleksandra Blaževski explores how meaning dissolves and reconfigures through technological systems, perception and institutional framing. Through sculptural interventions and photographic processes, including welded spirals of picture frames, degraded self-portraits transferred onto darkroom trays and etched copper images warped into convex forms, Blaževski questions what it means to see and who controls the conditions of sight. A Mirror That Forgets, A Frame That Spirals traces how images fragment, circulate and anchor memory, destabilizing their presumed neutrality—and engages phenomenology and media theory to ask how visual culture shapes identity, visibility and the unstable ontology of the image.
The Verant Richards Award is awarded annually to an OCADU graduating student for excellence in experimental photography. Verant Richards was a graduate of OCADU and a founding member of Gallery 44, known for his innovative artistic practice that pushed beyond the confines of a self-limiting definition of photography.
Aleksandra Blaževski is an artist based in Toronto with a BFA (Honours) in Photography from OCAD University. Her research-driven practice examines the ontological status of images and digital objects through sculptural interventions and experimental photographic processes. Drawing on media theory, phenomenology, and critical ontology, her work explores how institutional frameworks and technological systems shape perception, mediate memory, and influence the conditions under which images acquire meaning.
