Born in Newcastle, Ontario, but now working out of Montreal, photo-based emerging artist Derek Evans has quickly developed his own distinct style, perfecting a personalized approach right out of art school; it is esoteric even, in its labyrinthine method of arriving at an end product. A finished work by Evans resembles nothing so much as a maze of quasi-biomorphic materials, caught in the glow of some strange, almost alien, light source. His early interests in uniting depictions of light and space with a strongly tactile feel for the surface texture of things can be seen front and center in his current practice.

The process of getting there for Evans is however, an arduous one. Working with glue and resin, but primarily in wax, Evans builds a labour-intensive sculpture, molding and constructing until he has arrived at a point where what he has looks like a scale model of some fantastic place of indeterminate size, purpose, and composition. Seeming to be somehow natural and artificial at once, man-made but weirdly also irrational in shape and contour, these objects are planned to appear to look beyond what humans would or could do. The Artist works so as the deny us any certain knowledge of what these things definitively represent; they could be in a sense, almost anything.

In the photos that constitute Evans' finished work, the gleaming distances shot through with fiery colours, trans-positional entrances and exits, dark corners, and what seem like distant, smouldering constellations and nebulae are in fact images of these sculptures, backlit and shot in the artist's studio. taking hundreds of pictures at a time, Evans then proceeds to choose the ones that work best and photoshops them together into a seamless collage, in which we think we are looking at something almost unimaginably huge or maybe microscopically tiny (or paradoxically both); lit resembles a deep- space photograph from the Hubble telescope, or a scan of sub-atomic particles by an electron microscope. Evans' pictures evoke spaces and objects that suggest area and time spans we find it difficult to fathom.

Graduating from Concordia University's BFA program in 2007 having mostly concentrated on sculpture, prepared Evans well for an early maturation; without an expert sense of materials and how to manipulate them with his hand, his photos could not be so convincing, relying as they do on the things they are of. Even though they are shot digitally, their naturalistic sense remains, and remains, and contributes strongly to the sense of death, birth, the end and beginning that ultimately we ruminate on. this is seen in the recent work Cluster, where blue, green, and pink lights shine though what appears to be a galaxy made of intestines and umbilical cord. Accompanying the sense of silence and calm is an ambiguous but distinct symbolism, which evokes the idea (in reference to the title) of the birth of stars. It is an image of both apocalypse, and universal beginning. This is a young artist who has started his career strongly, with this mode of sustained and powerful "Big Bang" imagery.