MA

Ma is rooted in a Japanese concept: negative space not as absence, but as the charged interval between things , the pause that gives form its meaning. For Toronto photographer Laura Jane Petelko, it became the organizing principle for an ongoing body of work initiated during the isolation of pandemic lockdowns, and one that continues to evolve.

The series was born from an act of solidarity. Unable to perform, dancers from the National Ballet of Canada — along with choreographers and multidisciplinary artists collaborated with Petelko outdoors, at a distance, to create images that sought to transcend the constraints of that moment. Shot with deliberate in-camera abstraction, the figures emerge from and dissolve into light, stripped of detail in favour of something more essential: presence, endurance, the body as a site of feeling.

Petelko’s practice was fundamentally reshaped by a period in which she faced the prospect of losing her sight. Rather than sharpen her focus, she moved in the opposite direction, removing visual information to isolate what she believes photography most urgently needs to preserve: emotional truth. In Ma, that philosophy finds its fullest expression. The dancers are not documented; they are felt.

In 2025, she returned to the series, adding new works that lean further into embodiment, personal freedom, and resilience — extending the project’s meditation on what it means to hold grace under pressure, and to find spaciousness within constraint.

Ma speaks directly to the questions and continues to ask: who holds the gaze, what the body is permitted to express, and what becomes visible when we choose feeling over fact.

Collaborators
Actor: Chloe Rose
Dancer: Adelaide Sadler
Choreographer and contemporary dancer: Andrea Nann
From The National Ballet of Canada: Connor Hamilton, First Soloist Calley Skalnik, Principal Dancer Siphe November