Ocean Front Property

“I was in search of water and the effect its absence had on me,” writes Canadian sound artist and photographer Mark Templeton about his second photobook, Ocean Front Property. From this sense of absence and geographic isolation grew a new body of work with two components: A book of color photographs, made entirely in the landlocked province of Alberta (“where the nearest ocean is a thousand kilometers away”), and an Audio Experience (a ‘soundtrack’ to the book, included as a digital download). Rooted in the same sense of longing — for the imagined comfort of warm blue water and an escape from one’s familiar surroundings — these complementary sensory worlds form a kind of mirage: a prism of banal surfaces, spaces, and sonic textures through which the fragments of an intangible fantasy can be glimpsed, a circular psychic journey from the desolate to the sublime. The photobook also contains an 8-page supplement, compiling selections by eight artists whom Templeton invited to choose pairings of sound and image, suggesting possible feedback loops and alternative readings between the eight audio tracks and his photographs.