Concepia is more than just another Friday Harbor art gallery. I want to do more than just have beautiful photographs up on clean white walls for people to purchase. Yes, I run a commercial gallery, which means ultimately I have to turn a profit to keep the doors open, but like the great public art galleries around the world, I believe there lies a responsibility to educate as well as exposing the world to fabulous new art.

I don't have any formal education in the arts; my history is firmly planted in the sciences: I've been an engineer/manager for various oil and gas service companies around the world for the last fifteen years. I've lived in the Russian wastelands of Western Siberia, staring at thousand's of miles of subzero nothingness. My window has looked out at a million gallons of water while floating around the North Sea for weeks on end. From the shallow waters of the Caspian Sea in Khazakstan to the solid granite mountains of Central Italy, I seem to have always spent a lot of my life surrounded by visions of emptiness.

So it's no surprise that I am a photographer. What better way to counteract the memories of sparse expanses by framing my own visions with the viewfinder of a camera. That split second of time captured for years and years. A visual record of a frozen moment, wrapped in truth and carrying it's own story. But still equally capable of deception and creating a different story depending on the viewer. We see what we want to see. Some see just a pretty photograph and dismiss it as a non-art; 'how hard can it be?'. Others can appreciate the incalculable amount of creativity that it took for that hundredth of a second to be as perfect as it is.

I hope that as you walk through he doors of Concepia, you can look at the images on the walls and find something that stirs some feeling inside you, whatever that emotional response might be. Not every exhibition will strike a cord with you. In fact you may never find something that you can look at everyday for the rest of your life. But if you do, isn't that photograph worth as much as a great work of what we normally classify as 'Art'?

We often know instinctively what we like and what we don't; even when we should have a logical argument to back up our right-brained decision, we don't. So part of my vision for Concepia is to invite prominent photographers to come to our little gallery and talk about their work. Perhaps if we hear from the artist's mouth what he was thinking when the shutter closed then perhaps we'll have a better idea of why it 'clicks' with us.

I like to think of Concepia as an 'open-door' gallery. I don't expect you to come in and buy something straight off the wall. In fact I'd rather you come back a few times before you commit to a purchase. I'll even let you take a photograph home for the night to see how it feels on your wall. It's not about buying an investment, it's about buying something that you really love. It's about being authentic and honest with what you want.

John Sinclair
17th March 2009