There’s a quiet in Laura Jane Petelko’s work that doesn’t just fill the space—it is the space. Her images don’t ask you to look harder. They invite you to feel deeper.

Petelko, a Toronto-based photographic artist, has been quietly but confidently reshaping the way we engage with visual art. With painterly abstraction and an emotional depth that defies easy categorization, her photographs don’t just tell stories—they evoke moods, memories, and moments that exist between what is seen and what is sensed.

Last spring, during the 2024 CONTACT Photography Festival, Petelko unveiled Sway—a solo exhibition at The Cardinal Gallery. The title says so much. These images weren’t anchored; they hovered. Through soft focus, layered textures, and ethereal tones, Sway explored the spaces between movement and stillness, between self and other. It was a natural continuation of her exploration of emotional liminality—photography not as evidence, but as atmosphere.

Her series “MA”, named after the Japanese concept of negative space, is a poetic meditation on the spaces between moments. Featuring dancers and actors, including members of the National Ballet of Canada, the work emerged from the stillness of the pandemic. Petelko captures her subjects in solitary, dreamlike poses—soft, blurred edges that pull you into a contemplative hush. The images are less about precision and more about presence. It’s photography as breathwork.

Earlier series like “Soft Stories” and “Endless Gone” continue this thread. In Soft Stories, surreal animal-human hybrids in natural landscapes challenge our assumptions about identity and our fractured connection to nature. In Endless Gone, detail is intentionally stripped away, leaving only mood—a horizon of unspoken questions.

There’s something quietly radical about the way Petelko approaches her practice. A self-taught artist who once worked in fine art printing for names like Harmony Korine, she learned the craft in the darkroom trenches. Those years weren’t glamorous, but they were formative. “It really takes a village,” she’s said of the art world’s hidden labor. It’s a perspective that seems to echo in her images—the invisible scaffolding, the spaces between things, the whispered stories.

Her latest book, Secret Ways to Be, extends this ethos into print. It’s less a monograph and more a poetic companion, a curated invitation into her universe of soft edges and inward turns.

Whether showing in Toronto or at international fairs, Laura Jane Petelko’s work stands out not for how loudly it speaks, but for how gently it listens.

And maybe that’s exactly what we need more of right now.