Błażej Marczak | Time Out
Oct 4–25

Reception: Saturday, October 4 @ 3 - 5 pm
Artist talk @ 4 pm

RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Presales are open Saturday, Sept. 27 @ 10 am, online, in-person and via phone at 613-729-0003. If you would like to preview an artwork before collecting it, please contact the gallery at info@wallspacegallery.ca

Wall Space Gallery is pleased to present Time Out, a solo exhibition by Błażej Marczak that maps Ottawa’s quiet transformations through a series of precisely observed photographs. Since relocating to the city in 2016, Marczak has cultivated a slow, deliberate gaze, attuned to the subtle interplay between structure, season, and human presence across the urban landscape.

In this collection, Ottawa appears not as a city in motion, but as one caught in stillness, paused in the midst of its own, often imperceptible, evolution. Marczak’s photographs fix our attention on overlooked junctions of the built environment: the anonymous street corner, the snow-covered gas station, the solitary house edged by drifts, or the scatter of construction signage against modernist glass. These are images that suggest time not as a grand narrative, but as a series of small, unfolding gestures.

In Sparks & Lyon, a tangle of traffic lights and directional signs confronts the viewer like a visual equation without a solution. The composition is dense yet meticulously ordered, underscoring the contradictions of urban planning, with layers of instruction in a space emptied of people. It is a portrait of a city that governs movement even when no one is moving.

In Drummond’s Gas, the soft blue of winter twilight gives way to the glow of neon signage, its blur suggesting not urgency, but memory. The gas price becomes a timestamp, mundane yet definitive, while the rest of the scene hums with a slow, ambient disappearance. The presence of a Tim Hortons sign nestled among fuel indicators speaks volumes about the merging of national symbols with everyday utility.

Marczak’s practice resists spectacle. There is no dramatization, no romantic nostalgia, but an invitation to see differently. His approach is observational, almost archival, yet deeply personal. He does not impose a story on the city; rather, he allows its textures, geometries, and atmospheres to speak in their own time.

Time Out is ultimately an act of looking and of waiting. It encourages us to slow down, to find resonance in banality, and to recognize the profound in what appears routine. In doing so, Marczak reminds us that cities do not always announce their changes. Sometimes they whisper them, in winter light and flickering signage, in detours and empty corners.

This exhibition offers a meditation on time, place, and perception, proposing that to truly know a city, one must first be willing to pause.


Curator
Haruka Toyoda

Błażej Marczak is a documentary photographer currently focused on subjects in flux—urban landscapes that may soon change or disappear. He values the archival qualities of the medium, employing a unembellished approach that conveys the character of a place. His practice avoids stylistic devices that decontextualise or artificially evoke nostalgia and is informed by the subject matter itself, as well as by his wide-ranging interests and personal experiences.

Born in central Poland and raised during the socio-economic and political transformations of the 1980s and 1990s, Marczak moved to the UK in 2005, spending time in England before relocating to Scotland, where he graduated with a BA in Professional Photography from the University of Abertay Dundee in 2012. He has exhibited across the UK and internationally. In 2016, he moved to Canada, and since 2022, he has been represented by Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. His work is held in private and institutional collections, including the City of Ottawa Art Collection, and has been published widely.