My art has always been mine and no one else’s aside from those in my inner circle: Close family and friends. I always felt an uncontrollable selfishness and sense of secrecy immediately after creating anything and always ended up keeping it. After I turned 25 I felt a shift, a change – and could feel a small voice inside me speaking louder. It was time to share my thoughts, my work, my ideas – my brain – with the public.

This is my first public exhibition of my work and I think it is an appropriate “first words”.

Welcome to My Brain Is Haunted – a collection of photographs taken over six months of my life in Winnipeg. They are a mixture of two major components of my daily life: People and Architecture. I see these people every day, and I see these buildings every day.

I have always been fascinated by how something beautiful can be so negative and something ugly can be so positive. The goal of this project was to try to convey both the positive and negative associations I have with a person or place in a single image, rather than having one positive/beautiful image and one negative/ugly one.

These images were shot using a Sony digital SLR camera and then altered in post-production on a Mac computer. The actual content of each photo was not changed, only the highlights, shadows, contrast, exposure and colour saturation were altered in each photograph.

Toby Bartlett
2007