Capture Head Office 305 Cambie St Vancouver BC V6B 2N4 capturephotofest.com [email protected] Capture Photography Festival is produced by the Capture Photography Festival Society, a registered not-for-profit society. Please share your Festival experience with us at capturephotofest.com/2019-survey
2019 Director Kate Henderson Festival Manager Jaclyn Arndt Festival Coordinator Adrienne Rempel Communications Coordinator Brit Bachmann Community Engagement & Education Assistant Laura Noonan Graphic Design Vicky Lum Digital Image Editing Alina Ilyasova Website Sparkjoy Studios Printed in Vancouver by Mitchell Press Front and Back Covers Krista Belle Stewart, Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019 Board of Directors Mike Harris Emmy Lee Wall Ian McGuffie Eric Savics Kim Spencer-Nairn CHAIR David Thorpe Todd Towers Founding Donors John and Nina Cassils Stephen Carruthers Chan Family Foundation Mike and Sandra Harris Brian and Andrea Hill Hy’s of Canada Ltd. Jane Irwin and Ross Hill Jason and AJ McLean Michael O’Brian Family Foundation Radcliffe Foundation Ron Regan Eric Savics and Kim Spencer-Nairn Leonard Schein Ian and Nancy Telfer Samantha J. Walker (in memory of) Bruce Wright Anonymous Anonymous All content © 2019 the artists, authors, and Capture Photography Festival Society. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. All images are reproduced courtesy of the artist unless otherwise specified. Capture is not responsible for the specific content or subject matter of any work displayed or advertised. Some exhibitions or installations may be offensive, upsetting, or disturbing to some members of the public. For the most up-to-date exhibition and event information, please visit: capturephotofest.com
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL PUBLIC ART FEATURED EXHIBITIONS ARTICLES SELECTED EXHIBITIONS EVENTS YOUTH PROGRAM CALENDAR MAP GALLERY INDEX ARTIST INDEX 12–36 38–59 60–69 74– 106 110– 129 132– 140 152– 154 156– 157 158 159
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Kate Henderson, Director WELCOME
4–5 Neil Aisenstat David Allison Susan Almrud Grant Arnold Michael Audain Yoshi Audain Jan Ballard Mark Ballard Linda Banecevic Phuong Banh Nadia Belerique Nancy Bendsten Niels Bendsten Ryanne Bergler Peggy Bochun Sophie Brodovitch Rudy Buttignol MaryAnn Camilleri Elysse Chaffe Lisa Chase Brad Chernoff Susanne Chow Holly Clarke Dana Claxton Robyn Croft Jeff Curry Anna D’Avignon Shaun Dacey Andrea Rose Des Mazes Katherine Dennis Frank Doll Dennis Dong Andrya Duff Conrad Dykman Diane Evans Liana Evans Barbara Fairbrother Eric Fiss Sharon Fortney James Francom Jeff Fuller Roxanne Gagnon Lise Gaudette John Goldsmith Viviane Gosselin Kate Grauer Danielle Green Andrew Greenson Nikki Hadley Michael Hanos Helen Hayter Ross Hill Dave Ingram Lindsay Inouye Shaun Inouye Jane Irwin Megan Jenkins Gareth Jones Alexandra Kuskowski Paul Larocque Ken Lee Jessica Liebenberg Sabrina Loeprich Dean Long Brenda Longland Lise Magee Scott Massey Jenny-Anne McCowan Marnie McFadden Steve McGregor AJ McLean Jason McLean Gregg McNally Brian Messina Chris Miller Laura Moore Nelson Mouëllic Justin Muir Charity Munro Norm Ng Chris Nicholson Inna O’Brian Michael O’Brian Shane O’Brien Helga Pakasaar Gale Penhall Robin Peterson Brenna Pett Glenna Pollon Susan Powelson Nigel Prince Justin Ramsey Hannah Reinhart Tobi Reyes Mia Riddler Corey Robinson Monique Rodrigues Debra Rolfe Susan Rowley Denise Ryner Stephanie Savage Rachel Sawatsky Carol Sawyer Jamie Scoular Reid Shier Danny Singer Janet Smith Cassidy Smith Patryk Stasieczek Bill Storey Andy Sylvester Rachel Topham Biliana Velkova Mauro Vescera Alex Waber Stephen Waddell Emmy Lee Wall Ian Wallace Stephanie Wesik Michael Wesik Robert Willis Coach Wilson Helen Wong Lucas Wright Michael Young Karen Zalamea Kim Spencer-Nairn, Board Chair and Founder And a very special thank you to all the 2019 Capture Volunteers. THANK YOU
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 On behalf of TD, I’d like to congratulate the organizers and contributors of the 2019 Capture Photography Festival for putting together an inspiring collection of contemporary artwork. Art plays such a powerful role in building vibrant, connected communities. It can help bring people together by sparking conversations; raise awareness on issues that are not only impacting people locally but also reach across borders; and foster a sense of belonging as viewers relate to the story behind a piece. That’s why we are committed to supporting arts and culture that reflect diverse voices for a more inclusive tomorrow. We believe that when people feel included and participate in their community, good things happen. As part of our corporate citizenship platform, The Ready Commitment, we are proud to work with organizations like Capture that are helping to build an inclusive arts community that embodies the rich dynamics and culture of Canada. A Message from the Global Head of Sustainability and Corporate Citizenship, TD Bank Group Andrea Barrack, Global Head, Sustainability and Corporate Citizenship TD Bank Group A MESSAGE FROM …
6–7 A Message from Premier John Horgan A Message from the Hon. Lisa Beare Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture On behalf of Premier John Horgan and the Government of British Columbia, I would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone attending the 2019 Capture Photography Festival. This event is Western Canada’s largest lens-based art festival, featuring both local and international photographers. It is an excellent opportunity to view the stunning images caputured by top photographers from around the world, being exhibited at dozens of galleries and other venues throughout Metro Vancouver. In British Columbia, we are proud to have a vibrant arts and culture sector that spans the province. Our government is committed to supporting the pivotal role that arts and culture play in building a creative and sustainable economy that works for people. We are pleased to fund this festival through the BC Arts Council. Events like Capture Photography Festival contribute to the growth of BC’s creative economy by helping artists build their careers and advance their profiles internationally. As well, the festival’s tours, films, and artist talks provide valuable opportunities to connect and learn from other artists and industry representatives. I would like to thank Capture Photography Festival for hosting this event. I also want to acknowledge all the volunteers and sponsors whose involvement and support make this festival possible. Best wishes to everyone attending this year’s festival. For those who are visiting, I hope your time in BC is memorable and that you have the chance to explore some of the worldclass amenties Vancouver has to offer. As Premier of the Province of British Columbia, I extend my warmest welcome to everyone attending attractions throughout Metro Vancouver for the 6th Annual Capture Photography Festival. Photographic arts are a powerful tool for expression and a wonderful way to reflect and share our culture. The annual series of art exhibits, talks, workshops, and lens-related events offered through this festival creates fantastic opportunities for people throughout our communities to take in stimulating media and engage in inspiring discussion. Through these types of activities, we can all appreciate the vibrant diversity of our province and grow our understanding of our environment, our neighbours, and ourselves. This year promises an exciting program, and I want to thank the artists, organizers, and volunteers for their hard work making Capture Photography Festival an ongoing success. I hope you all take full advantage of this chance to support local talent and see the impact of varied lens-based art. Enjoy the experience! Hon. Lisa Beare, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture John Horgan, Premier of British Columbia
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 SUPPORTERS We gratefully acknowledge the support of In-Kind Sponsors Media Sponsors Partners Presented by Major Supporting Sponsor Supporting Sponsors Contributing Sponsors VAPA burrardartsfoundation
8–9 Join us for the kickoff of the 2019 Festival following the first Capture Speaker Series talk, with Deanna Bowen (p. 112). Music, food and drink, and artists in attendance. CAPTURE 2019 FESTIVAL LAUNCH April 3, 2019 7–8:30 pm Elizabeth Milton, A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes, performance documentation, 2018. Photo: Richard Clark Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
Tom Hsu, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, 2019, installation mockup, part of the 2019 Canada Line Public Art Project 10– 11
Christina Battle, the view from here, 2019, part of the 2019 Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project: Signals in the Sea, curated by Jayne Wilkinson (p. 22)
Public Art
PUBLIC ART Every year, Capture programs a Public Art Program designed to engage and challenge audiences, invite discussion around critical issues, and expand ideas of what lens-based art can be. The installations are sited across Metro Vancouver and many are developed in collaboration with and supported by our community and organizational partners from around the region. CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Krista Belle Stewart, Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019, digitally manipulated photograph on vinyl, installation mock-up. Photo: Nelson Mouéllic CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
Completed in 1954, the BC Hydro’s Dal Grauer Substation was designed by the young architect Ned Pratt and artist B. C. Binning. The building was commissioned by the B.C. Electric Company, under the helm of then-president Edward Albert “Dal” Grauer, to bridge functional design and public art. The substation would go on to serve as a threedimensional “canvas” that was said to resemble a Piet Mondrian or De Stijl painting. The modernist philosophy with which the building was designed emphasizes the link between art, architecture, and everyday life. With this in mind, Capture Photography Festival has commissioned artists annually to create new site-specific works to be installed on the Dal Grauer Substation’s facade. Drawing on the building itself, these projects temporarily emphasize the substation in the streetscape and reassert it as an architectural icon. Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Sylix/Okanagan Nation and a Vancouver-based artist. Stewart works with video, land, performance, photography, textiles, and sound, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. For Earthbound Mnemonic (2019), Stewart used as source material a photograph of tiles she made out of earth from her home in Spaxomin, which she then digitally manipulated and coloured in red and copper to create a visually and contextually multilayered work. BC HYDRO DAL GRAUER SUBSTATION PUBLIC ART PROJECT Curated by Kate Henderson, Capture Photography Festival April 2019–March 2020 944 Burrard St, Vancouver Presented in partnership with Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association EARTHBOUND MNEMONIC Krista Belle Stewart Krista Belle Stewart is in conversation with writer Tania Willard as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 16 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 113). Public Art 14– 15
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 1 Krista Belle Stewart Indian Momento, 2016, installation view, In search of Expo 67, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017, Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Guy L’Heureux 1
Public Art 16– 17 ORTHOGONAL HEART LINE: INTERSECTING THE COLONIAL GRID In early colonial buildings and cabins in the Americas, windows were made of mica, waxed linen, or paper. Glass windows did not become common until shipping routes and time frames were shortened between the colony and the Crown. Until ships plundering the “New World’s” gold became wealthy and steady enough to supply the colonies with such civilized things as windows. I want to take a minute to think about windows not existing. Seeing the land only when you decide to go outside, and in that act being part of it, the land around you. Windows allow us to pretend we are separate: we are inside, and we consider outside as being behind an invisible barrier, a transparent separation. A window is one of the many things that has a colonial story, that we navigate within an architecture of coloniality. Small windows in early log cabin missions and forts have become glass-walled petrochemical office towers, and glass and windows the world over symbolize the contemporary moment of urban and controlled spaces. This is the classic colonial grid. We frame views in windows, we sell products in window displays, we block wind and reflect sky with windows that climb higher and higher to frame better, more expansive, more expensive views. Photography can be thought of as a distribution of views through windows. Made up of lenses of melted sand and mineral flooding across ice-thin sheets and exposed to sunlight. Colloidal silver, glass plate, negatives, all are methods of taking pictures of views framed within a window, exposed onto a window, and then developed into another view. There is a colonial grid in all these windows. Not all windows consume, not all glass eats up the sun. I want to understand that a window can be something else. In Krista Belle Stewart’s new work, Earthbound Mnemonic (2019), installed on the windows of the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation in downtown Vancouver, windows become not about seeing in or about separation; instead, they are containers. Stasis chambers for story. Caring for and keeping narrative in a state of stable care to promote its longevity, to allow story to take a long journey like the multilightyear expeditions of science-fiction astronauts. This long archive of story can be understood more deeply when we realize the work’s source imagery is made up of digitally altered photographs of the artist’s earthen tiles from the installation Eye Eye (2018). In this earlier work, Stewart worked with soil from her home in Spaxomin (Douglas Lake, BC) and formed and fired it into tiles, which are installed in a grid pattern on the gallery wall. Subtle variations in earth and mineral create small portals through which we look into the land, not out of a window at it. Stewart’s installation on forty-eight windowpanes of the Dal Grauer interrupts the colonial grid with striking red and copper forms that outline the bloodline of this story. Drawing from her work with grids, familial and relational narratives, histories of colonial-settler relations, and the archive, this new work positions the earthen tiles as an abstraction of the process of the earlier Eye Eye work. The source image of Earthbound Mnemonic is these same earthen tiles, photographed in the kiln—lining its sides, stacked up, and arranged—in the process of firing. This photograph reflects the artist’s process and acts of translation, which are key concepts in many of her works that are iterations of the “historical.” Locating the deep geological time and the living Syilx presence on the land, each tile in Eye Eye represents a deep archive of life lived in relationship to the land. Further abstracted in Earthbound Mnemonic, the process of the tiles’ making is still evident, but coded. As coded and deep as our own bloodlines. Presented with the final image, we are left to infer our own meaning, a process of divination that asks our own cultural selves and diverse embodied Tania Willard Classic Colonial style Colonial window Colonial column Colonial house plans Colonial countertops Colonial marble and granite Colonial farms Colonial grid Colonial 1 See, for example, the image at Owen Geiger, “Thompson Indian Tribal Pithouse,” Natural Building Blog, April 12, 2014, http://www. naturalbuildingblog.com/ thompson-indian-tribalpithouse.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 narratives to read the work. I see: an underground home, a traditional pithouse, an Indigenous architecture, a home. These copper and red forms could be read spatially in reference to one another; some are stacked and some intersect in oblique, as opposed to gridlike, meeting points within the embrace of a hexagonal structure. This is remarkably like the log-frame structure of an underground home: four central pillars support a hexagonal frame, with log sides stacked ladderlike on top of this frame, and bark, tree boughs, and earth used for the roof.¹ This architecture is itself an archive, as coded teachings and cultural knowledges inform it, set in a balance of reciprocity between the people and the land and the story. Story is always part of the land and part of the structure. The speculative architecture in Stewart’s image is only my reading. It strikes me that the inversion at play in the work operates at many levels: in the inverted role of the land and its relationship to a framing device; in a window and a lens, or a window as a lens; in the intensity of the colour shift between the copper and the red vinyl; and in the idea of the archive as a humancentric historical device. Here archive is not made by us, but includes us and our stories on the land, both in the past and more recently. Perhaps it is not surprising that when I first saw the work without any context regarding its creation process, I thought it was a graphic version of an underground home or kekuli. These geometries are themselves coded in relationship to the land and to us. These stories have always arrived in stasis, and awake when they are called upon. That it is in stasis does not mean the story is unshifting—grids are made of orthogonal lines that meet at right angles or, in art history, that denote a vanishing point. In the case of Earthbound Mnemonic, Stewart points to her process of “iterative representation,” explaining that “history is understood through multiple (re-)mediations.” This grid has become a container of possibilities, outcomes, and narrative; relations are held at right or intersecting angles to each other, not in rigidity but in care and interrelatedness. The vanishing point is another interesting implication for this work within the context of Stewart’s practice. A vanishing point in the pictorial tradition of perspective can also be correlated to the concept of the “vanishing race,” which is much more about the suppression of Indigenous culture and taking of Indigenous lands, or, as professor of anthropology Audra Simpson puts it, “what was being lost was not culture but land—Indian 2 & 3 Krista Belle Stewart, Eye Eye (detail), 2018, Courtesy of the artist 2 3
Public Art 18– 19 2 Audra Simpson, “Why White People Love Franz Boas; or, The Grammar of Indigenous Dispossession,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, ed. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 169. land, and lots of it.”² There is no vanishing point in Stewart’s image. If anything, it appears as an aerial topography suggestive of structure; in fact, it is a representation of an intimate process and a human scale of materials and creation. This scale has subsequently shifted in the final installation of the work: the intimate process of relationship to material, to cultural narrative, and to iconography has been scaled up to architectural size into an image that becomes an aesthetic of coded stories. Another story one could tell about vanishing lands and peoples in the wake of colonial grids is about energy grids. The Dal Grauer building is an electrical power substation designed in the modernist moment to reveal, through its glass exterior, a celebration of electrical consumption. Hydro power in this province exists in the dubious realm of self-affirming settler-owned or Crown land. We do not have to look far into Earth’s archive, the history in the land, to see that most of the province’s energy comes from Indigenous resources. While this heritage-status building is lauded as a confluence of engineering and art—appearing, as it is sometimes said, like a Piet Mondrian or De Stijl painting—Stewart’s practice is well honed in both interrupting these grids and also in adopting them into relation with her own aesthetics. Extending the continuity of relationality, the work, installed on the building’s central bank of windows, is held between the De Stijl architectural reference. This recontextualization reveals other translations and inversions at play in the work. Every time this story is awakened, it entertains a new telling. Kriste Belle Stewart’s image suggests a speculative architecture, an archive of land laddered onto a contextualizing grid. Do these hexagonal lines and markings disrupt the colonial grid or assert their own structure amid it? If this story is in a slow-shifting stasis—in a chrysalis of narrative—then this narrative of historical (re-)mediation may be travelling to the edges of the universe, in this stasis chamber, to the futurity that was eclipsed by colonial constructs. This is an orthogonal heart line, reaching back in time to the ancestral and simultaneously forward into the unknown, and always intersecting with story. Archives of land are like that—existing in specks of dust and vast expanses at the same time, scaling story as it shifts. 4 Krista Belle Stewart, Indian Artists at Work (detail), 2016, Courtesy of the artist 4
CAPTURE LIMITED EDITIONS CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Capture is pleased to announce the addition of Krista Belle Stewart's Earthbound Mnemonic (2019) to the Capture Limited Editions series. All proceeds from sales of editions, which range in price from just $100 to $400, support Capture Photography Festival Society, a non-profit cultural organization. To purchase, email [email protected] or visit https://squareup.com/store/capturephotofest/ Krista Belle Stewart Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019 Edition of 34, $100 Nadia Belerique In the Belly of a Cat, 2018 Edition of 30, $300 Dana Claxton WHY, 2014 Edition of 30, $300 Jessica Eaton DG Weave, 2015 Edition of 50, SOLD OUT Scott Massey Spectrum Study 4 (infrared), 2014 Edition of 50, $100 Alex Morrison Brand New Era Social Club, 2017 Edition of 40, $350 Birthe Piontek Trouts, 2013 Edition of 50, $100 Danny Singer Trossachs, 2005/2014 Edition of 100, $200 Patryk Stasieczek Tactile Compositional Iteration, 2016 Varied edition of 30, $123 Stephen Waddell The Collector and Showroom, 2016 Edition of 50, $350 Ian Wallace Clayoquot Protest (August 9, 1993), 1993/2015 Edition of 50, $400 View all the Capture Limited Editions on the Capture Photography Festival website at capturephotofest.com/capture-limited-editions/
Public Art 20 –21 Krista Belle Stewart Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019 21 ″ × 14 ″ Screenprint of a digitally manipulated photograph Courtesy of the artist Edition of 24 + 2 APs $100
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Christina Bale Eshrat Erfanian Susan Schuppli April 3–30 Sited on 7 billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St (between 5th and 6th Ave), Vancouver and 4 billboards at the corner of Quebec St and 5th Ave, Vancouver PATTISON OUTDOOR BILLBOARDS PUBLIC ART PROJECT SIGNALS IN THE SEA 5 Susan Schuppli, Disaster Film, 2019, installation mock-up Curated by Jayne Wilkinson Curator Jayne Wilkinson delivers a talk as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 9 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 112) and hosts a DIM Cinema event on Wed. Apr 10 at 7:30 pm (see p. 120). 5
Public Art 22–23 6 Eshrat Erfanian, no place to run to, 2019 From the shore, the sea is a horizon. From the sea, the shore is a distant line. Both perspectives construct oceanic space from the imaginary of what is below the surface and beyond sight. For citizens of previous centuries, mapping the oceans meant drawing lines around infinite expanses and filling them with imagined monsters and mythic creatures. Our oceans are not so different, except that mythic beings have been replaced by non-human sentience of other kinds. The contemporary ocean is full of sensing devices, data streams, fibre-optic networks and powerful deep-sea submersibles. But this infrastructure rarely comes into public view. When it does, it looks much like we might expect—wires, cables, submarines. It’s difficult to connect these objects of the network with the sublime imagery the ocean still conjures. For this multi-site project, I invited three artists, whose work is informed by the intersection of environmentalism and digital technologies of seeing, sensing, and communication, to produce site-specific work for a series of outdoor billboards in Vancouver. Signals in the Sea is a project about the tensions between human vision (or what we see at the surface) and non-human vision (or what we know about a depth). It is about how we might sense environments beyond an exclusively visual realm and about how our relationship with, and proximity to, the ocean might be a way of situating ourselves in the environmentally fraught present. Here the sea becomes a symbol, or signal, for the distances between humans and our non-human kin. With different aesthetic approaches, artists Eshrat Erfanian, Susan Schuppli, and Christina Battle each find in the sea and its surfaces a metaphor for the concealment (or containment) of information. Vancouver is a city where everyone desires to see something—ocean, mountains, sky—from where they are, and the Pacific shoreline creates the economic value of “the view.” But how can we know about what exists beyond our sightlines, about what exists at a distance? Even as remote-sensing technologies are refined and adapted, giving us precise information about the deepest, coldest, deadliest parts of the sea, those spaces remain largely inaccessible to us. Humans can’t survive underwater, after all. Eshrat Erfanian presents two horizons on opposite sides of a single billboard. On one side, the expanse of the sea’s surface unfolds in ripples before us. Delicate letters placed along the horizon, where the sea and sky meet, spell out a fact of contemporary life: there is no place to run to. It is an evocative phrase, and seems fatalistic at first. Does it suggest the plight of global refugees and the climate change crises that have forced many to run, fleeing homes that have become (politically, ethically, environmentally) unliveable? At one time, the sea was a signifier of escape, since what existed beyond its great horizon was largely unknown. The edges of our world are no longer invisible—the limits are mapped, and the resources and requirements of life are in increasingly short supply. The horizon was once a signal from the future, a place to run toward, but is no longer. On the flip side, the horizon is continually unfolding in a kaleidoscopic, even psychedelic image. Using the same refracted blue light as the ocean’s surface, Erfanian’s second image is computer-generated, automatic. The optical illusion of an endless, repeating pattern points us outside our own borders, reminding us of ways to sense what is beyond the frame of our singular vision. It is a rendering with no edge, no beginning, no end; it confronts the viewer by positioning them in the same way a horizon does, by making the experience of viewership both subjective and universal. Perhaps reminiscent of the way one can become lost when looking at the sea, here the surface of photographic representation is shattered. Here, the horizon is in us. We want to believe this fantasy—that the sea is a space that never ends—but in less than a century, humans have made quick work of the ocean’s life systems, allowing corporate interests to intervene. In 2010, a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by the explosion of a deep-water drilling rig owned and operated by British Petroleum (BP), released a continuous stream of crude oil into the gulf, causing a miles-wide oil slick. Even as BP tried to control the media access to the site, the mixing oil and water became a slick surface that was visible from above. At the shoreline, the eventual reach of the spill decimated marine life by covering everything in glossy black goo; the three-month long continual release of oil thousands of feet below was visible online through livestream. Susan Schuppli’s Disaster Film (2019) adapts her ongoing research into the material evidence of the BP oil spill, as well as environmental “accidents” more broadly. The billboard series interprets the various visualities of surfaces and depths, suggesting the multiple sites of an unfolding disaster: the underwater plume where oil gushed, the mixing of oil and water at the 6
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 7 Christina Battle, the view from here, 2019 sea’s surface, and the aerial view from above, where the oil became a rainbow pattern of refracted light. Critically, these images are not representations of the spill itself (which was a spectacular media event on its own) but are computer-generated simulations that intervene into the material context of investigation, and into the idea of the ocean as evidence. Taken in sequence, they form a kind of “oil film”—the technical name for an oil spill—that spreads out across four billboards. The slick surface aesthetics of both oil and CGI point to the difficult beauty of matter out of place. The fear of an earth that is unruly and unstoppable, even with the most masterful of human engineering, is what the BP event signifies. But despite its destruction, it hasn’t changed the number of rigs in the gulf nor the intensity with which oilproducing countries, Canada included, are pushing extraction farther and farther offshore. Our ability to represent such spaces, under heavy surveillance and protected by corporate power, might fall to the very materials we attempt to understand. Schuppli writes that we have entered “a new geo-photo-graphic era in which planetary systems have been transformed into vast photosensitive arrays that are registering and recording the rapid transformations induced by modern industrialization and its contaminating processes.”¹ By combining materials-based research with media, Schuppli’s work demonstrates the toxic in-between spaces of oil and water, of surfaces and depths, and of process and production. Christina Battle’s images are the most directly related to their installation sites, demarcating a presence and immediacy connected to the oceanic and digital economies that serve Vancouver. In this new commission, the view from here (2019), Battle asks viewers and passers-by to think about the digital infrastructure and networks that are obscured by the surfaces of the sea. Even as ships fill the harbour and fibre-optic cables line the ocean floor, it is easy to ignore these economies in favour of the ocean’s romance. By combining Google Earth–sourced imagery from the specific installation sites, contour lines suggesting varied underwater depths, and lifeforms from an alien world, Battle creates a kind of feedback loop of visual regimes. The Twitterlength poetic texts prompt viewers to ask how they sense, feel, and understand proximity to water. As complex image composites, produced with recourse to satellite imaging and mapping technologies, they remind us that the sea is literally a medium for sending and receiving signals and that it teems with contradictory messages. Environmental art historian T. J. Demos points out that in the visual culture of the Anthropocene (our current, human-defined geological epoch), a notable shift has occurred from photography to high-resolution satellite imagery and remote-sensing technology, scaled to global, even interplanetary measurement. Today, photography consists primarily of images that are automatic and constructed, not mimetic and indexical—Battle’s collages tread in this terrain. Representation does not take the form of a single image, but is instead situated somewhere in the littoral space of an urban shore, within a technosphere that extends from the deepest parts of the ocean to the highest paths of atmospheric satellites. In a 2012 interview, technology theorist Paul Virilio described standing on land and gazing out at the surface of the sea as though looking upon “the marine infinite, the place where the three elements of the biosphere connect: the atmosphere, the end of the lithosphere and the beginning of the hydrosphere. The three limits [are] in short, an extraordinary place.”² We can’t see these points of connection, but, like the connective tissues of our watery human bodies, the oceans are a kind of network medium— the space that carries the signal, that thing that permits transmission. The ocean has long fascinated us perhaps because, despite the newest technologies and most comprehensive remote sensing and scanning, and even despite its vital importance in climate change discourse, there is still much about oceanic space that remains an impossibility. 1 Susan Schuppli, “Slick Images: The Photogenic Politics of Oil,” in Allegory of the Cave Painting, ed. Mihnea Mirca and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei (Milan: Mousse, 2015), 431. 2 Paul Virilio and Jean-Louis Violeau, “The Littoral as Final Frontier,” Animal Shelter, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 60. 7
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Alana Paterson Over the past few years, BC-based photojournalist Alana Paterson has become deeply invested in issues of gender inequality and women’s civil liberties. Paterson’s recent works focus on women’s empowerment through sport, particularly young women at the beginning of their careers. Currently, women represent only 7 percent of sportspeople seen, heard, or read about in the media, and only 4 percent of sports coverage focuses primarily on women. Paterson’s images shed light on this disparity while celebrating women’s strength and resilience in a male-dominated field. For her most recent project, Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball (2018), Paterson was invited to shoot with the young women’s half of the Junior All Native Basketball Tournament (JANT), held in Vancouver in 2018. The tournament is made up of over eighty-three teams from fifty nations with U13 and U17 divisions. JANT serves to empower its team members and reinforce that they are strong, resilient young people and talented athletes. After working closely with the team over the past year, the artist has captured each team member’s energy, portraying them as direct, playful and fierce. Paterson’s images work to empower young Indigenous women in the face of continuing racism and intergenerational trauma caused by a dark history of colonization, and the residential school system in Canada. The project both captures a visual identity of Indigenous women through sport and revitalizes the sense of strength, perseverance, and passion for which Indigenous “Warrior Women” are renowned. TRANSLINK PUBLIC ART PROJECT SKWXWÚ7MESH NATION BASKETBALL Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station April 2019–March 2020 Curated by Kate Henderson, Capture Photography Festival Presented in partnership with TransLink
Public Art 26–27 Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station A more extensive exhibition of Alana Paterson's Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball, curated by Justin Ramsey, will be on view at The Polygon Gallery from April 13 until May 12, 2019. Join us for the opening reception on Sat, April 13, 1 pm. April 13–May 13 The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Ct, N Van Alana Paterson, Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball, 2018, installation mockup (detail) Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 For the 2019 multi-sited Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lens-based artworks on the exteriors of Canada Line stations throughout Greater Vancouver. This year’s project stretches across seven locations, from Waterfront to Richmond–Brighouse, and includes curatorial contributions from local art organizations Arts Umbrella, Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Richmond Art Gallery. CANADA LINE PUBLIC ART PROJECT Presented in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program—InTransit BC Canada Line Transit Map 1. Waterfront 2. Vancouver City Centre 3. Olympic Village 4. Broadway—City Hall 5. King Edward Zone 1 Zone 2 6. Lansdowne 7. Richmond—Brighouse April–September 2019
Public Art 28–29 Tom Hsu’s series of seven photographs capture momentary fragments of summer for commuters rushing through the barren corridor at Waterfront Canada Line Station. His intimately cropped imagery of flesh, flora, and fire provoke memories or fantasies of mid-summer wanderings. They produce responses engaging subconscious desires. With a close look, one can visualize the sensation of cold ocean water hitting bare legs or the heat of cinders exploding in a bonfire. Through visual means, Hsu’s work produces sensory experience. The images, all shot on a 35 mm camera, present fragments of moments. Each is an experience stilled and cropped. Whether a midnight foray into the forest or a hot day at the beach, each photograph opens up to endless possible experiences of place. Our city, Vancouver, is an unacknowledged participant throughout the series, always there in the background. Or is it rather our experience of place that imprints the expanded frame of Third Beach or East Van onto these images? Hsu’s work holds a kinship with that of photographers such as Fred Herzog, Robert Frank, and Wolfgang Tillmans. With camera in hand, Hsu is a purposeful wanderer. He documents life around him with an eye for compositions that launch the mundane or ordinary into the wild and electric. Subjects are approached from odd angles, cropping out the larger scene to focus on specific forms. Many viewers have commented on the intimacy his work engenders. There is a playfulness and sensuality born of the physical connections among photographer and subject. The title, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, is a provocation to engage with risk and uncertainty. Waterfront Station AN URGE TO PROPOSE FORBIDDEN Tom Hsu THOUGHTS AND PLAYING WITH FIRE Curated by Shaun Dacey, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program and City of Richmond Tom Hsu, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, 2019 1.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Photographer and filmmaker Naveen Kishore has extensively documented men performing femaleidentified roles in Manipuri, Bengali, and Punjabi theatrical practices. These images were taken during the filming of Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri’s Story (1999), one of Kishore’s most renowned projects to date, in which he revisits the life of iconic Indian stage actor Chapal Bhaduri. Bhaduri is one of few actors who follow a tradition of playing female characters, which flourished in jatra (Bengali folk theatre) until the early 1960s. At one time the star of Bengal’s stage, Bhaduri spent his life playing women in the village theatre. More recently, he has been performing the goddess of disease, Sitala Mata, who cures souls from both spiritual hauntings and ailments such as poxes and pustules. Recounting Bhaduri’s metamorphosis from man to goddess, Performing the Goddess explores what it meant for him to become a woman on a nightly basis, at the height of his career. Kishore’s film generated a new interest in men playing female roles at a time when global discourse regarding queer and gender identities was growing. For Bhaduri, performing gender was his life’s work, when being with his male lover was never a feasible reality. Under the Buggery Act, established during British rule on the Indian subcontinent (1858 to 1947) and in force until September 2018, homosexuality was a criminal act punishable by ten years of imprisonment. Comprising a video documentary and selection of photos shot on set, Naveen Kishore’s Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri’s Story is featured in Moving Still: Performative Photography in India (p. 56), a group exhibition that traces the trajectory of performative lens-based practices in India on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from April 19 to September 2, 2019. Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and an initiative of the Institute of Asian Art, and curated by Diana Freundl. Vancouver City Centre Station PERFORMING THE GODDESS: Naveen Kishore CHAPAL BHADURI’S STORY Curated by Diana Freundl, Associate Curator, Asian Art, Vancouver Art Gallery and Gayatri Sinha, independent curator and founder of Critical Collective Naveen Kishore, Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri's Story, 1999, inkjet print, Courtesy of the artist 2.
Public Art 30–31 In transit (2019) demonstrates the work of Arts Umbrella students working through the theme “reflections.” The installation features both darkroom and digital photography practices created by two classes of students aged 13 to 19 during the fall session at Arts Umbrella. Students worked to interrupt the theme and unpack how darkroom and digital photography intersect and complement each other. For this project, student artists Maria Varbanova, Tyrese Temple, Alex Sikorsky, Bali Chu-Mehrer, Diego Minor, and Jackie Franks were instructed by teachers Kristen Roos and Alex Waber. See also the accompanying exhibition In transit: Reflections at Remington Gallery, April 6–15 (p. 136). Olympic Village Station Arts Umbrella Photography Students IN TRANSIT Curated by Roxanne Gagnon, Alex Waber, and Kristen Roos, Arts Umbrella Arts Umbrella Photography Students, In transit, 2019, installation mock-up 3.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 In Lacuna (2018), Birthe Piontek investigates how photography and the human body are connected, with a special interest in the female body and its representation in our society. “Lacuna,” a Latin word, means an unfilled space, gap, or cavity, especially in bone. Piontek is interested in the fact that neither image nor body can ever represent a totality: the image always shows only a part and so does the body, as it conceals the thoughts and the inner life of its individual. The body never seems to be whole or complete, since it is subject to constant change and the processes of aging. In this project, vintage press photos and portraits of women from the 1950s and ’60s are partially cut, set up in three-dimensional collages, merged with other materials such as fabric, fur, and hair, and then photographed. Piontek is interested in how the body and photographic image not only influence each other but also share certain traits: they both act as canvases for our projections and are inherently transformable objects. Through this intervention, Piontek emphasizes the images’ incompleteness. The faces of the depicted women are cut out, and what remains is only a figure, an outline, or a reference to a photographic image and the person it depicted. When the individuality of the image is dissolved, it becomes universal: a faceless surface onto which we can project and through which we can question our preformed ideas of body image, femininity, and gender roles. Broadway–City Hall Station LACUNA Birthe Piontek Curated by Kate Bellringer, Burrard Arts Foundation Birthe Piontek, Lacuna, 2018 4. Birthe Piontek launches her new artist book Abendlied and speaks with curator Kimberly Phillips as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 30 at 5:30 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 113).
Public Art 32–33 Each composition of Anthropocene; The Present I was created to reveal the destructive presence of humans, suggesting the disappearance and decay of the natural world. The artist’s process for this series consisted of digital image capture of industrialized landscapes, which she photographed both locally and globally, followed by the meticulous digital manipulation of form, shape, and orientation. The focal points within each artwork portray the potentially cataclysmic modern world, from the urbanization of our species and the rise of fossil fuels to industrialization, consumerism, deforestation, and energy consumption. These circular configurations spiral into themselves, symbolizing introspection and the infinite cycle of creation and destruction. Although the earth has witnessed geological rebirths, it has never been faced with this type of crisis. Our species alone is responsible for the ominous changes that we have inflicted upon our planet, and as highly conscious beings, we are unique in our awareness of our own culpability. This series aspires to incite each individual to action in the shaping of our collective future by way of influencing awareness and sharing solutions. Four entries to the Canada Line Competition were shortlisted by jury, and the winning photographs, by Desirée Patterson, were determined by public vote on the Georgia Straight’s website. King Edward Station ANTHROPOCENE; THE PRESENT I Desirée Paerson Georgia Straight and Capture Canada Line Competition Station Desirée Patterson, Anthropocene; The Present l, 2019 5.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 The Solarium (H+A) (2019) uses a system of custommade mirrors and metal armatures to augment and interrupt the usual experience of photographic portraiture. The mirrors reveal alternative angles within the frame as well as objects outside of the frame while simultaneously blocking areas that would normally be visible. Shot in the Richmond home of the couple pictured, The Solarium (H+A) is a continuation of Adad Hannah’s interest in the history, mechanics, and technology of photography, highlighting the veracity and performativity within the photographic image. For over a decade, Hannah has been exploring historically trenchant themes through elaborate bodies of work that include installation, video, and photography. Inspired by the historical practice of tableaux vivants (translated as “living pictures”), Hannah’s work invokes the durational form of early cinema while referencing the history of photography, often through reinterpretations of art historical moments. 6. Lansdowne Station THE SOLARIUM (H+A) Adad Hannah Curated by Shaun Dacey, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program Adad Hannah, The Solarium (H+A), 2019
Public Art 34–35 In Musqueam culture, salmon is sacred. They are a symbol of abundance, prosperity, and wealth. They are our livelihood. We have the responsibility to respect all things, which includes protecting our salmon populations. A continued decline in their numbers would be devastating for our people. It is accepted among the Coast Salish Nations that the Musqueam were the sentinels of the river and protectors of the great resources of the estuary. Fishing season in Musqueam is a family affair. For Fraser River Families, I reached out to family and Musqueam community members for images of fishing on the river. In many of these photos, you’ll find my grandfather, Robert Point. He was the backbone of our family. Our culture was very important to him, and he always shared his knowledge and teachings with all of his children and grandchildren. As a young Musqueam person, it has been interesting to learn some of my family history and our connection to what is now called Richmond. Many Musqueam people were responsible for overseeing points of land here, such as Point Roberts, Garry Point, and Point Grey, and so the legend is that Catholic priests gave these people the surname Point. This history is incredibly important, because it connects me not only with my ancestors but also this place. As a community and First Nation, Musqueam has always practiced strong and proud traditions. We have lived in our Traditional Territory and fished salmon from the Fraser River since time immemorial. This knowledge continues to be passed on through families to our future generations. Many nonIndigenous residents of Richmond are unaware of our history here. It is important for others to know that this city sits on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam people. — Diamond Point 7. Richmond–Brighouse Station FRASER RIVER FAMILIES Diamond Point Curated by Paula Booker, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program Diamond Point, Fraser River Families, 2019 A panel of Indigenous artists selected Diamond Point to be the featured artist for this station from an open call for a Musqueam artist. Point produced the work through an intensive mentorship with artist Krista Belle Stewart.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 April 2019–May 2020 Evann Siebens’s W-E-L-C-O-M-E to PoCo (2019), produced for the City of Port Coquitlam’s Street Banner Program, is a public art project installed on 250 street banners hung in civic squares, major city throughways, and various neighbourhoods of the city. W-E-L-C-O-M-E to PoCo seeks to communicate place and belonging through welcoming gestures and by highlighting the cultural diversity and natural landmarks of PoCo. The project consists of a total of fourteen diptychs. Half of the diptychs picture residents of diverse ages and cultural backgrounds. Capturing the cultural and demographic diversity of PoCo, these images speak to the makeup of the community and tell people’s stories. Each person on the street banner gestures “welcome” by spelling out one letter of the word in American Sign Language. The word is also written in English and the person’s native language. On the other side of the diptych is a close-up shot of the hand gesture together with the letter it represents. The banners fit together like a puzzle, spelling the word W-E-L-C-O-M-E as one travels down the street or views them in civic squares and parking lots. The other seven images take the same individuals but place them into a PoCo landscape as silhouettes, where the figure (along with their gesture) is cut out of the landscape, leaving white or brightly coloured negative space. Featuring highly recognizable PoCo landmarks and sites, these images speak to the community’s distinct relationship to the natural world and urban landscapes around them and the histories inscribed in place. The City of Port Coquitlam’s Street Banner Program invites artists to propose a public artwork that reflects, contemplates, and highlights the community of Port Coquitlam: its people, natural beauty, defining features, and contexts. Street banners are installed for the duration of one year and are accompanied by an artist-led public workshop. Evann Siebens W-E-L-C-O-M-E TO POCO Sited on 250 street banners throughout Port Coquitlam Presented by City of Port Coquitlam’s Street Banner Program Evann Siebens, W-E-L-C-O-M-E to PoCo, 2019, installation mock-up
FEATURED EXHIBITIONS This year’s Featured Exhibition Program features five of the top-rated participating exhibitions as decided upon by the 2019 exhibitions jury. With a mix of shows at galleries and artist-run centres, the 2019 Featured Exhibitions represent some of the most compelling and current lens-based art showcased in this year’s Festival. a Handful of Dust Group Exhibition An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance Kali Spitzer A Harlem Nocturne Deanna Bowen A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes Elizabeth Milton Moving Still: Performative Photography In India Group Exhibition The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver grunt gallery 350 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery 555 Nelson St, Vancouver VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby St, Vancouver p. 40–43 p. 44–47 p. 48–51 p. 52–55 p. 56–59 CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
1 Man Ray, Dust Breeding, 1920, SOCAN 2019, part of a Handful of Dust (p. 40) 1
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 On until April 28 The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver Tu–Su: 10 am–5 pm; M: closed Admission by donation A HANDFUL OF DUST Group Exhibition 3 2
40–41 I am a curator of exhibitions, and recently I was invited to put together my “dream show.” That’s a phrase to raise the eyebrow of any Freudian, but I took it seriously. What could such an exhibition be? A dream will defy the logic of time and space: things from an almost forgotten holiday combine with yesterday’s trip to the cinema. Moreover, there is often no obvious connection between what is dreamt and what it might mean. This is not unlike our initial responses to images. We intuit that an image cannot carry a message the way a truck carries coal, and so we are not held by rational thought. Why not begin an exhibition with such a photograph, an image so wide open it could mean almost anything, or nothing. A risky start. In 1920, the artist Man Ray was visiting his friend, Marcel Duchamp, in his studio on Broadway, in Manhattan. Man Ray was complaining to Duchamp that a rich collector wanted him to photograph her artworks. Duchamp suggested his own latest, unfinished artwork might be something upon which Man Ray could practice. Eventually, Duchamp’s piece would become known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23); but on that day in 1920, it was just a horizontal surface, covered in a thick layer of New York dust. Man Ray remembered: “Looking down on the work as I focused the camera, it appeared like some strange landscape from a bird’s-eye view.” Relocating to Paris, Man Ray brought the photograph with him. Surrealism, with its interest in the unconscious and the uncanny, was blooming. In October 1922, it was published in a little journal with a deliberately misleading caption: View from an aeroplane (much later it would be titled Dust Breeding). Seeing Earth from above is disorienting, but wartime aerial reconnaissance photographs had already become common currency in newspapers and magazines. Devastated cities have an unsettling beauty. Meanwhile, many avant-garde photographers were starting to shoot unexpected subject matter from new angles, attempting to revolutionize perception itself. Also in October 1922, T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land. The great dreamlike poem of the interwar era picks over the rubble of Western civilization like a literary detective, stacking up quotations and allusions as fragments of evidence. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” warns Eliot. To many writers and artists of the 1920s, the ideal of a rational, stable order was looking more like a fantasy. What if The Waste Land and Man Ray’s photograph of dust, appearing that very same month, were harbingers of the ensuing century? This would be the theme of my exhibition. Any photographer will tell you that dust has a double-edged relation to the camera. It must be kept well away from the equipment, but it is deeply photogenic. Floating in the air, dust motes catch the light and settle on surfaces as a soft glow. There is also something universal about dust. We come from it, go to it, and create it daily with all the inevitability of breathing, and dying. So, an image of dust, even one as obscure as Man Ray’s, is likely to have all manner of resonances and associations. Some will be yours only, but many will be shared, from the epic scale of the aerial view and the abstract landscape to the close-up world of forensic imaging. Curated by David Campany 4 2 Eva Stenram, Per Pulverem Ad Astra (detail), 2007, unique chromogenic prints, Courtesy of the artist 3 Eva Stenram, Per Pulverem Ad Astra (detail), 2007, unique chromogenic prints, Courtesy of the artist 4 John Divola, Vandalism portfolio (detail), 1974-75 (printed 1993), gelatin silver prints, Courtesy of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia Kennedy Featured Exhibitions
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Beyond these associations, many artists have explored the idea of dust as material and metaphor, with its allusions to time, mortality, and ruin. For example in the early 1970s, the Californian John Divola began breaking into disused houses, making mysterious, ritualistic interventions in the corners of rooms, and then photographing them. More recently, Eva Stenram placed under her bed colour negatives of images that NASA sent back from the surface of Mars. She allowed balls of dust to gather on them before making prints. The cosmic and the domestic implications of dust are conflated. Even when images of dust are thoroughly earthbound, they can be otherworldly. Jeff Mermelstein, a street photographer in the classic mould, was out shooting in New York that September morning when the Twin Towers were struck. His shot of a public sculpture in a powdered avenue near Wall Street is both urgent and entirely dreamlike. He wrote: “I’m not a war photographer, so this wasn’t an easy experience for me. The constantly shattering glass was terrifying and distracting, and my camera kept getting completely covered in ash. But because for years I have been taking documentary pictures of New Yorkers out on the sidewalks, there is a way in which I was prepared.” In 1991, the French artist Sophie Ristelhueber visited the deserts of Kuwait. Allied forces had pushed Saddam Hussein’s invading army back into Iraq, and Ristelhueber wanted to see, for herself, the traces left behind: tanks, personal belongings, and long trenches dug into the sand. She photographed on foot and from the air, always looking down as if surveying the ground before her. The resulting series was titled Fait, meaning both “fact” and “done.” In a short text, Ristelhueber reveals her inspiration: “By shifting from the air to the ground, I sought to destroy any notion of scale as in Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s Dust Breeding.” In 2007, Ristelhueber printed one of these photographs as a single work, titled À cause de l’élevage de poussière (Because of the dust breeding). It is a striking image, and its genesis speaks volumes about the unpredictable effects that images can have upon us. An artist photographs a former war zone and her visual template is a peculiar, semi-abstract view of a half-finished artwork made seventy years earlier, on another continent. No logic can account for that. We don’t file images in our minds the way they are filed in an archive or searched for online. Words will not come close to accounting for the madness of images. 5 Jeff Mermelstein, Statue (‘Double Check’ by Seward Johnson), New York, 11 September 2001, 2001, C-print, Private Collection 5
Featured Exhibitions 42–43
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance is about identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love— these images are about resilience and resistance. In this series, Kali Spitzer uses tintype photography to capture her community of mostly Indigenous and mixed-heritage people, while challenging preconceived notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Tintype or ferrotype photography was a product of the mid 1800s and most popular during the US Civil War. The medium persisted into the twentieth century at fairs and carnivals as tourist photography, and more recently has been revived as novelty or art photography. Tintype was the first real populist form of photography, making photographs available to working-class people. It’s hard to look at tintypes now and not be thrust back into the colonial era, and many of Spitzer’s photographs look like they could have been shot at a rodeo or powwow, retaining that populist leaning. But the artist’s use of this type of photography that is so tied to the colonialist project to produce images of decolonialism and empowerment is subversive and strategic. March 15–April 27 grunt gallery #116–350 East 2nd Ave, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su&M: closed Opening Reception Thu, Mar 14, 7–9 pm AN EXPLORATION OF RESILIENCE AND RESISTANCE Kali Spitzer Curated by Glenn Alteen 6 Kali Spitzer participates in a panel discussion on identity building in photography as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 23 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 113).
44–45 NURTURING RESILIENCE: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF KALI SPITZER 6 Kali Spitzer, Kiniaii, 2016, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″ 7 Kali Spitzer, Cora-Allen Wickliffe and Son Chaskewaste Twiss, 2018, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″ I am arrested by Kali Spitzer’s photographs. I am stopped in my tracks, staring. Time need not hurry. A love vibe lives here. Good medicine. The richly toned faces in these tintypes have an edge of historical depth to them, as if they have emerged from the primordial days of photography, but with eyes speaking witness to contemporary lives. These photographs span the generations. This body of work, titled An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance (2015–), addresses the multifaceted concerns of “identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love,” says Spitzer in her artist statement for her exhibition at grunt gallery. “I photograph my community of primarily Indigenous and mixedheritage people, challenging preconceived notions of race, gender, and sexuality,” Spitzer tells us, adding, “I’m showing who we are today, bringing light to our stories and creating a space for us to be seen and heard, defining ourselves, making it clear how we want to be represented.” While the collective portfolio of the Resilience and Resistance photographs relates to community, the individual images focus on personal identity. Spitzer says, “Every photograph, every person, has a story to tell, and I am supporting them to tell these stories through their portrait. I believe that each image I take is a collaboration between the person I am photographing and myself. I wouldn’t be able to create the images I do without trust. This is an essential element of my work—giving a safe space for the individual to be seen, heard, and documented the way that they want to be represented.” In the gallery presentation, most of the portraits are accompanied by a recording of the sitter’s voice. These spoken words reinforce the tradition of oral history, with variations ranging from poetic expression to ancestral reflections. Spitzer explains, “The viewer is urged to look right at us and listen to our stories. I think that hearing somebody’s voice is really important, and a lot of people use their Indigenous language to introduce themselves.” Henri Robideau 7 Featured Exhibitions
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 The interpersonal, “looking right at us” aspect of these tintypes is unavoidable. In most cases, the sitter’s eyes meet those of the viewer. “That is my preference,” says Spitzer, “and I have mixed feelings on this. But sometimes when people aren’t looking at the lens, the image could then be interpreted as objectifying. Because so much of my work is about being seen and being heard, there is a lot of value in staring straight into that person’s eyes.” The search for identity in these photographs begins with the photographer. Kali Spitzer is Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, BC) on her father’s side, and Jewish from Transylvania, Romania, on her mother’s. She spent her early childhood with both parents in Whitehorse and then Yellowknife, and after age six, with her mother in Victoria. She says, “I’m very linked to both of my parents, and feel strongly that people also include that I’m Jewish, because I often find they only want to hear about the fact that I’m Kaska Dena, and I have to go chasing them saying no, you’ve only got half my lineage. I visited the North a few times with my mother when I was younger, but started going back up by myself when I was nineteen. I’d say that’s when I got to spend a lot of time with my family and get to know everyone in that context of my life. That’s when I started documenting my people, which is another huge part of my work that I feel passionately about.” The people represented in Spitzer’s portraits are drawn from her community of family, friends, fellow students, and artist colleagues. “My community is diverse and includes Indigenous people who grew up immersed in their culture, knowing exactly who they are and where they come from,” she explains. “It also includes Indigenous people who grew up away from their land and their community for many different reasons, including the effects of colonization, residential schools, and lateral violence. Many of our parents were stolen at a young age, ripped away from their land and placed in the horrendous institution of residential schools, which has created a huge gap in passing down our cultures.” Rebuilding, reconnecting, and nurturing resilience are ideas imbedded in Kali Spitzer’s photography: “Too often, Indigenous women and non-binary communities are not heard or seen in the way we define and experience ourselves in society. I am working to redress this by creating images of contemporary Indigenous people from an Indigenous perspective.” Spitzer achieves this with great beauty, honesty, and empathy. Citing just one example from the Resilience and Resistance series, a head and shoulders portrait of Chemehuevi artist and photographer Cara Romero radiates an organic timeless glow, drawing the viewer into the well of dark eyes, while the audio track’s poetic narrative told by Romero’s soft voice weaves together life’s experiences, a people’s existence, nature’s perpetual cycle, the eternity of the land, and love for lives created. One cannot escape unmoved from this work. The surface of Spitzer’s portraits have a rough-hewn, swirling fluidity, which results from the tintype’s handapplied wet collodion emulsion, an elaborate process that dominated the early days of photography, from about 1850 to 1880, and has recently seen a revival. One of its key characteristics is the orthochromatic rendering or disproportionate darkening of warmer skin tones. Spitzer’s use of this anachronistic technique imbues her work with an ambiance of history, a wonderful harmonic to the audio narratives of people telling their generational stories. Because the tintype must be developed immediately after being exposed, there is an element of instant gratification where both collaborators—the photographer and the sitter—see the result at the same time. This can be a shocking revelation: “I have that reaction, too, with tintypes. Also, the harsh lighting they require accentuates wrinkles, and sometimes people are taken aback at first. But then a minute later, they actually really love it, and that’s a beautiful moment. I want people to feel empowered and good about themselves when they look at their image, that’s the part I love the most.” 8 Kali Spitzer, Cara Romero, 2016, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″ 9 Kali Spitzer, Holland Andrews, 2018, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″ 8 Henri Robideau is a photographer and cultural narrator who lives and works in Vancouver.
46 –47 9 Featured Exhibitions
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 April 5–June 16 Contemporary Art Gallery 555 Nelson St, Vancouver Tu–Su: 12–6 PM; M: closed Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 7–9 pm A HARLEM NOCTURNE Deanna Bowen 10 Deanna Bowen, Choo Choo Williams at the Harlem Nocturne, 2019, vinyl print on billboard (offsite at Fraser and Kingsway), Courtesy of the artist and Lovena Fox Deanna Bowen delivers an artist talk as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Wed. Apr. 3 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 112), followed by the 2019 Festival Launch at 7 pm (see p. 124). 10