Force Majeure, 2010 – Installation view monitors, Odd Gallery, Dawson City, Yukon, 2012 – Photo: Paul Litherland

Force Majeure, 2010 – Installation view monitors, Odd Gallery, Dawson City, Yukon, 2012 – Photo: Paul Litherland

I make photographs and produce multimedia performances. In my work, I explore themes of masquerade, vulnerability, risk taking, awkwardness and masculinity. I am interested in fakery, how one thing can pass for another. I want the unreal to stand in for the real. I want the photograph of the painting to stand in for the painting. I want the photograph of a cloud to be me. I want the fake thing to be so fake that it has to tell the truth.

I have a compulsion to create a contrast between being something and acting something. I make paintings and then photograph them to ask the question "Are we looking at a painting, or a photograph" I am compelled to create situations of physical and psychological danger. I am interested in the difference between risk taking and being vulnerable. A number of years ago, I learned that my fear of looking stupid is bigger than my fear of dying, and I want to know who else thinks that way.

A formal device that emerges regularly is framing subjects to emphasize a feeling of awkward, tragicomic isolation.
Finding ways to go through fear without panicking is a game of self-control that I enjoy on an almost daily basis. This desire to live an intense experience, as seen through the acts of dressing in drag, BASE jumping, and boxing is translated directly into my art practice. I use these difficult, complex and sometimes cumbersome situations as mediums for direct and honest communications.


Paul Litherland is a visual artist/performer living in Montréal. His recent exhibtions include «Risquer l'interprétation» presented at Leonard & Bina Ellen gallery and at Espace Projet,“Force Majeure” at Galerie Clark, “Fall Out” at the University of Toronto’s Blackwood Gallery in 2009, performing “Wood vs. Wood” in Berlin 2008, and was part of the “Faking Death” exhibition at the Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC, in January 2006. He studied photography and fine art at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) and graduated from the MFA program in photography from Concordia in 1994.