48–49 It is hypothesized that dark matter, which cannot be directly seen, accounts for a great amount of the total mass of our universe. Its existence is inferred from the gravitational effects it appears to have on everything else. One could imagine, therefore, that dark matter is in fact responsible for configuring the relationships of all things to one another, binding person to person, people to place, and present to past. When I think of the focus of Deanna Bowen’s artistic gaze, I imagine a kind of dark matter. Her practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US—often connected directly to her own family—that remain below the threshold of visibility, not because they are impossible to see but because they are difficult for the majority culture to acknowledge. Mining overlooked archives and forgotten documents, Bowen makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to bring traces of a complex, deeply personal, and often violent past into public visibility. Bowen’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), A Harlem Nocturne, comprises two separate trajectories of research that follow the artist’s maternal lineage in Canada. In one gallery, a four-channel video installation presents footage from ON TRIAL The Long Doorway (2017), a project co-commissioned by CAG and Mercer Union, Toronto. It focuses on a lost 1956 CBC teledrama titled The Long Doorway, in which Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby played a supporting role and it tells the story of a Black legal aid lawyer tasked with representing a white University of Toronto student charged with violently assaulting a rising Black basketball player. The Long Doorway is potent for Bowen because Canadian culture so infrequently, in her words, “takes up questions of race in its own place,”1 and because the issues the episode examined in the mid 1950s are no less urgent today. Conspicuously, no recordings of the teledrama exist, so Bowen used the recovered script and set design notes to experimentally restage the work with five Black actors, each of whom performed multiple roles throughout the exhibition’s public, video-recorded rehearsals. Just as the original script refuses any resolution to the tense questions it poses around race and class, visitors to Bowen’s multichannel video installation at CAG are confronted with an amalgam of overlapping readings of the script, and we must follow the cast through myriad threads of dialogue as they parse out the scenes and deconstruct Featured Exhibitions “The event that is documented does not fully coincide with itself. . . . It constitutes a trace, which is pedagogically oriented toward the future. One needs to learn from it.” —Thomas Keenan “The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?” —Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin 1 Deanna Bowen, “What a Live Performance of a Lost 1956 CBC Show has to Say about Race Relations in Canada today,” CBC Arts video, 3:55, posted October 2, 2017, cbc. ca/arts/exhibitionists.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 them from their own positions. Offsite at the Western Front (see p. 120), a single edited cut presents Bowen’s restaged teledrama in its entirety. Across the hall in CAG’s larger gallery, a second major suite of works presents a terrain of research that Bowen undertook in Vancouver in 2017–18, recovered from civic documents, newspaper clippings, and numerous personal and organizational archives. This material traces a series of interconnected figures who formed an integral part of Vancouver’s Black entertainment community from the 1940s through the end of the 1970s. It includes Herman Risby, who performed in numerous Vancouver theatrical productions; renowned dancer, singer, songwriter, and choreographer Leonard Gibson (who shared the stage with Risby in Vancouver’s Theatre Under the Stars 1952 production of Finian’s Rainbow); internationally recognized American choreographer, dancer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, who performed with her company in Vancouver in 1947; Vancouver-based jazz vocalist Eleanor Collins, who appeared with Risby and Gibson in Finian’s Rainbow and was the first Black artist in North America to host her own television program, the CBC variety series The Eleanor Show (1955); Bowen’s first cousin once removed, Choo Choo Williams, a shake dancer and co-owner, along with her husband Ernie King, of the Harlem Nocturne nightclub at 343 East Hastings Street, from its establishment in 1957 until its sale in 1968. As Black bodies living and working in a settler colony rife with societal and institutionalized police racism, they were at once invisible and hypervisible, variously admired, embraced, exoticized, surveilled, discriminated against, and violently attacked. They enjoyed certain celebrity in their local milieu and endured differing degrees of prejudice, bigotry, and segregation. What these recovered documents ultimately reveal is the picture of a complex, varied, and intersectional Black community in Vancouver, one offering a powerful counterpoint to common narratives that oversimplify the city’s Black presence by containing it within the spatial, economic, and temporal confines of Hogan’s Alley.2 We encounter these figures in the exhibition by navigating a field of archival evidence—evidence being precisely that which is not self-evident and becomes evident only through the eyes and ears of others.3 Bowen is careful to preserve what the theorist Allan Sekula calls the “radical antagonism”4 of the documents’ different modes of pictorial address (the structures of power underlying grainy newspaper images and FBI files differ vastly from those of promotional headshots, televised dance numbers, and family photographs). She translates each document into a discrete form, in an explicit effort to bring them into visibility. We regard choreographic notation, reinterpreted and reperformed dance sequences, large-scale wall vinyl, framed prints, photocopied transparencies, hand-painted signs, sculpture, a book work and, offsite elsewhere in the city, a billboard. Everywhere we are confronted by Bowen’s tools of retrieval and viewing, whether overhead projectors, lightboxes, or flatbed film editors; in fact these apparatuses are often the only means through which the material becomes visible and legible. Such legibility, however, is simultaneously challenged by the many registers of blackness that comprise A Harlem Nocturne: a darkly luminous black in the lightbox and video works; a light-absorbing black flocking; draped black chiffon; and black redaction. These different modalities of black speak not only to the obstructions and opacity Bowen encountered in her research efforts, but also to her strategies for protecting communities close to her family by avoiding a repetition of the overexposure they endured in their public and private lives. A Harlem Nocturne takes up many of the concerns currently shaping discussions in photography and Black visual studies. Africana studies scholar Tina Campt urges her readers to consider photographs as dynamic and contested sites of Black cultural formation, and as “an everyday strategy of affirmation and a confrontational practice of visibility.”5 She follows feminist theorist and photography historian Laura Wexler in stressing that “what we learn of the past by looking at photographic records is not ‘the way things were.’ What they show us of the past is instead a ‘record of choices.’” Campt extends this to suggest that photographs offer a record of intentions as well, as “it is only through understanding the choices that have been made between alternatives—learning what won out and what was lost, how it happened and at what cost—that the meaning of the past can appear.”6 Bowen’s work also reminds us of photography’s instrumentalizing power. As Sekula contends, to 11 2 See Wayde Compton’s Canadian Encyclopedia entry on Hogan’s Alley for a summary and further readings. 3 Thomas Keenan, “Getting the Dead to Tell Me What Happened: Justice, Prosopopoeia, and Forensic Afterlives,” in Forensics: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), 45. He continues: “It is not an answer, but a question: it asks for a decision, for a reading or an interpretation, it asks to be told what it says.” 4 Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 445. 5 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 7. See also Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 6 Laura Wexler, quoted in Tina M. Campt, Image Matters, 6. 11 Deanna Bowen, Theatre Under the Stars’ cast photo from Finian’s Rainbow, circa 1953, 2019, archival inkjet print on cotton rag paper, 16″ × 20″, Courtesy of the artist, Theatre Under the Stars, and Cecilia and Roger Smith
Featured Exhibitions 50–51 achieve legitimacy photography relied heavily on the archival model. “We might even argue,” he suggests, “that archival ambitions and procedures are intrinsic to photographic practice.”7 In his influential 1986 essay “The Body and the Archive,” Sekula describes the way that, “in a more general, dispersed fashion ... photography welded the honorific and repressive functions together.”8 He continues: We can speak then of a generalized, inclusive archive, a shadow archive that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain.... The general, all-inclusive archive necessarily contains both the traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all other embodiments of the unworthy.9 Perhaps this “shadow archive” is ultimately Bowen’s dark matter—a representational paradigm that cannot be seen directly but silently constitutes the all-encompassing structure within which Black experience was contained, made visible, and variously vilified or admired in twentieth century Vancouver (as elsewhere). In daylighting its evidence, Bowen’s objectives are forensic. She understands how to search for these traces, because she too inhabits a body that is subject to this same paradigm’s principles of organization. And therein also lies the force of her work, her visual and material mattering of that archive—both its residual and potential meanings—because, to borrow the words of artist Hito Steyerl, “a document on its own—even if it provides perfect and irrefutable proof—doesn’t mean anything. If there is no one willing to back the claim, prosecute the deed, or simply pay attention, there is no point in its existence.”10 (Text by Kimberly Phillips, Curator, Contemporary Art Gallery) ON TRIAL The Long Doorway was commissioned and produced through a partnership between the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, and Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto. Production support was provided though a Media Arts residency at the Western Front, Vancouver. Additional support provided by Clark’s Audio Visual. 12 7 Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 444. 8 Allan Sekula “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986): 10. 9 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 10. Emphasis in the original. 10 Hito Steyerl, “What Is a Document? An Exchange between Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl,” Aperture, Spring 2014, 62 12 Deanna Bowen, Gibson Notations 2, 2019, transparency in lightbox, 50.7″ × 28.25″, Courtesy of the artist
A GUIDED MEDITATION WITH VHS EYELASHES Elizabeth Milton A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes is an experiential performance by Elizabeth Milton that explores screen space, maximalist femininity, and pop culture notions of transcendence. Using camp materiality and absurdist excess, Milton collides video projection, live performance, and hyperbolic visualizations into a series of meditations that draw from a history of feminist performance, drag cabaret, and psychoanalytic theory. In a fevered exaltation of the femme sublime, Milton will guide participants through an immersive installation and into a chromophilic wonder of video noise, theatrical snow, and glitter while exploring the lines between the material and immaterial. Playing with the slippage between the camera, the mirror, and the screen, A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes embraces a sequin-laden absurdity in order to fracture and reflect the illusionistic “magic” of lensbased media and grieve the loss of analogue forms. April 18, 7:30 pm (one night event) VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver All images: Elizabeth Milton, A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes, performance documentation, 2018 Photos by Richard Clark, Fran Tirpak, and Sydney Southam One night only! April 18, 7:30 pm CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
After a lengthy period of hiding, followed by a celebrated cult re-emergence, VHS sits down to discuss her deep connection to the signal and what it feels like to become an icon after all these years. It was a dark night when I arrived on set to interview VHS. The sun had long fallen behind the mountains, leaving the skies drearily unplugged and desperate for a glimpse of starlight. Inside the studio, the light was still alive. It radiated through the space with a fevered heat, drenching everything in a late December spray tan. Cheap lighting gels had melted atop hot bulbs and poured themselves into bluegreen pools on the floor. Reaching for my sunglasses, I found myself wanting to dive in and float amid the turquoise. The glossiness of it all was undeniably intoxicating. The fragrance of White Diamonds wafted by in drunken clouds, and I began to fully surrender. I knew she was near. As I began to nervously make my way toward her, a potent melody took hold of me. The song, somehow familiar with its quivering pitch, caught me in its tide, slowing my steps to the weighted trance of a chorus girl and guiding me toward a sofa in the corner of the room. Collapsing onto the plush brocade, I slipped off my shoes and realized I could see her through the window. At first glance, she seemed to be made of pure light. Like an actor collapsed on the stage in an endless burial of theatrical snow, it was difficult to tell where she began and the glitter ended. Sprawled out by the pool, sunglasses on, she seemed to be connected to another signal. “Is that you in the video noise?” I whispered. Seeing her for the first time in real space, I could understand why there has been such an ongoing cultural fascination with her. She is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. She is a beautiful nothing. Slowly she began to come into focus. Dusting off the video snow, she gestured for me to come closer. I could see her vibrating in the light, a distorted prism of red, orange, pink, turquoise, violet, and green. She was pure iridescence, changing from moment to moment, angle to angle. CHANNELLING THE LIGHT: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH VHS Elizabeth Milton 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). Feature Exhibitions 52–53
“I’m not exactly ready, but I suppose we could get started,” she said. Her makeup was being done, each brushstroke twisting her into something unknown. I stumbled toward her, trying to find my balance while her colour-bar distortions flickered around me. She was a vision to behold, a shaky handheld apparition from another time. “So what do you want to know? Is this another series of questions on how I’m one thing one second and become another in the blink of an eye?” As I started to nervously respond, she began to shift. Like a carefully timed magic trick, she had turned into a distorted reflection of diamonds and hairspray: a smeared colour field of Elizabeth Taylor, seated across from me on the couch. “You can be so many things at once. Do you remember when you first transformed?” I asked her. She gazed up at me with violet eyes, vibrating between channels. It was clear she wasn’t responding to me, but answering someone in the distance. I think it was Oprah in 1992. “It was the white light. The liquid mercury of the white light changed me. It set me floating. I became weightless.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the spotlight or a near-death experience, but it was clear that being in the light changed her. Gazing into the light, where the video noise lives, she found a crystal ball where she could project her desires. Perhaps she was too large to be contained by the small screen, for within moments she vanished, falling back into a field of colour, rippling in the light from red to pink to white to blue. She was a vanishing Virgin Mary caught on tape, like the VHS footage of the Lady of Medjugorje that circled around the Croatian Catholic Church when I was a child. In the end, I think my Teta taped over it with episodes of her favorite soap opera and the magic lady disappeared and reappeared as Susan Lucci. “You are forever in flux, drifting between the sacred and the profane,” I commented. “Well, I am tape, after all”, she remarked. “I’ve been used to mend what was broken. Some would call me a healer. Some think that I am a witch.” She began to drift in and out of her own contours, chasing traces of overlapping forms. Her Psychic Hotline fingernails gestured to the heavens, melted into Star Search high kicks, and morphed into grainy bodies dancing in the 1970s. She was slipping between channels. It was as if she were turning the camera at the monitor, multiplying herself into an infinite stream of forms. “Are you breaking up?” I asked her. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying, but either way I knew she was feeling deeply. Her voice warbled into a thousand other voices. I could hear Lucille Ball’s laughter, aged with the wear of an endless stream of reruns, cackling in harmony to a Whitney Houston aria. I couldn’t help but want to sing along, to lip-sync the words as they spilled out of her—to feel what she felt. She looked up at me, and I could tell she was fading. I felt a kind of sickness in knowing that I found her even more beautiful now that I knew she was leaving. Her colour had washed away. She would be returning to the white light. Dusting off the noise like bits of confetti, she drifted slowly behind the window and toward the pool, sprawling herself in the same position I had found her. Lying on the couch, I could see her through my own reflection. We became image on image, cancelling each other out into a nothingness of reflected colour. The glare of the surface was so strong that it forced me to slide my sunglasses back over my eyes. From here I continued to sit, absorbed in the light. CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
Feature Exhibitions 54–55
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 April 19 to September 2 Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby St, Vancouver M–W, Th–Su: 10 am–5 pm; Tu: 10 am–9 pm Admission: $6.50 (child)–$24 (adult) MOVING STILL: PERFORMATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY IN INDIA Group Exhibition 13 Exhibiting artist Pushpamala N. delivers an artist talk as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Sat. Apr. 27 at 3 pm at the Vancouver Art Gallery (see p. 113).
56–57 Moving Still: Performative Photography in India features artists who participate in their own photonarratives, positioning themselves at the centre of social and political inquiry. Through their work, this exhibition explores themes such as gender, religion, and sexual identity. Recent scholarship on Indian art reveals the importance of photography in nineteenth-century India through to the present. Beginning in the late 1850s, photographers in Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (now Kolkata), and Madras organized lectures and exhibitions, fostering an active culture of experimentation and exchange regarding imagemaking that continues today. Moving Still includes key work from this early period by Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, both considered pioneers of photography in India. With this historical context in mind, Moving Still focuses on the lens-based practices of contemporary artists who are rooted in the diversity of cultures in India, while at the same time engaging in global dialogue. Pushpamala N, one of today’s leading international figures in conceptual photography, video, and performance, creates colourful scenes using herself as the subject. In Sunhere Sapne (1998), she presents an ironic look at the Indian family post-independence by staging herself as both a stereotypical middle-class housewife and her fantasy alter ego, a wealthy, well-styled socialite. Vivan Sundaram reconfigures his grandfather Umaro Singh Sher-Gil’s iconic photographs into digital photomontages, thereby creating an alternative family history and narrative. Others who challenge dominant cultural and intellectual discourses in their work include Sunil Gupta and Naveen Kishore, who each explore the politics of gay life through different social and cultural perspectives. Blurring fact, fiction, and mythology in the multichannel video Between the Waves (2012), Tejal Shah uses photo-narrative to confront societal norms around sex and gender. Representing the transformation from still photography to moving image, the video works of Sonia Khurana and Anita Dube explore questions of gender and body, while the interdisciplinary works of Ranbir Kaleka and Kiran Subbaiah weave together aspects of painting, performance, and cinema. From the late nineteenth century up to the present,artists in India have been constructing and reconstructing realities through lens-based practices. Moving Still vividly highlights those artists who—whether working in photography or video—have imaginatively harnessed the power of the camera to both reflect and reshape the everyday. Participating artists include Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Vivan Sundaram, Anita Dube, Sonia Khurana, Gauri Gill, Sunil Gupta, Pushpamala N, Tejal Shah, Kiran Subbaiah, Ranbir Kaleka, Naveen Kishore, and Nikhil Chopra. Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, an initiative of the Institute of Asian Art, and curated by Diana Freundl, Associate Curator of Asian Art, and Gayatri Sinha, independent curator and founder of Critical Collective. 14 13 Naveen Kishore, Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri's Story, 1999, inkjet print, Courtesy of the Artist 14 Pushpamala N, Sunhere Sapne (Golden Dreams), 1998, hand-tinted black and white photograph, Shumita and Arani Bose Collection, NY Featured Exhibitions
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 15
58–59 15 Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Sisters in bed, c. 1932, modern silver gelatin print with selenium toning, Courtesy of PHOTOINK Featured Exhibitions
Strata of Many Truths Roxanne Charles Acts of Looking: At the Intersection of Photography and Medicine Sara K. MacLellan Framing Dundee: An Interview with Hua Jin Brit Bachmann TD Curator Highlights Far Below and Far Away Denise Ryner p. 62 p. 64 p. 68 p. 70 p. 160 The critical essays, interviews, and artist statements presented in this section touch upon current ideas in photography and expand on issues and topics raised by the 2019 Festival programming. ARTICLES 16
16 Boys at Work, 1920, donated by Joe Siah (Sto:lo), Museum of Vancouver Collection, pic.863.001 17 Ironing Day, donated by Joe Siah (Sto:lo), Museum of Vancouver Collection, pic.873.001 17
Fragments of the truth are everywhere. There are many truths. Layers of many truths. Strata. Artist intervention or response? Who am I, and what am I doing here? You might ask yourself the very same thing as reader of this page. Do you question the voyeuristic nature of this ritual? Where are the sovereign spaces of such a spectacle? Traces, fragments, ideas, reflections . . . Archive, memory, moments, history, interpretation . . . Documentation, desire, despair . . . Who has the voice, the authority? What do we save, and what do we not? What do we share, and what must we keep for the sovereign spaces of our sacred bundle? Whose stories remain silent, and whose are forcibly told? What stories choose to bury themselves deep inside our DNA, carrying themselves from generation to generation? What stories hide themselves at the outer layer of the picture frame or under the innocence of these children’s precious faces? The history of Canada, like the history of anything, is deeply complex with numerous layers, each rich in memory, and not all of them pleasant, to say the least. I question my authority. I question my authority to have voice in such matters. My interpretation of the data lies not only in the photographs on the museum walls or the transcriptions of our aunties’ voices, but also in the perpetual beast that still roars through our communities, cities, and streets—disguised as prosperity to all. When looking upon these photographs of children of St Mary’s residential school, I am attuned not only to what is visible but also to what is not. I am present to the memories and stories of this place ... a place so many children were forced to make their home. I am present to the generations and history lost, to the shame, pain, torment, and humiliation cast upon Indigenous bodies. To the pain carried by our Elders, whom we love so dearly. I cannot and will not formally look at and discuss these photos through some scientific or academic lens. Instead, I will question and authentically respond in a way that is true to myself, respectfully acknowledging the limitations of the visual plane, which so many hold in such high regard. Instead, I will follow my instincts and intuition into the unknown . . . the unseen. I am honoured by the opportunity to be in conversation with such vibrant spirits and souls—souls radiating with resistance, resiliency, and creativity, provoking questioning and thought much deeper than the images that document them. What stories do these STRATA OF MANY TRUTHS Roxanne Charles Capture is pleased to partner with the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) to commission artist Roxanne Charles to create an artwork in response to the exhibition There Is Truth Here at the MOV as well as to the museum’s collection of archival photographs of St. Mary’s Residential School in Mission, BC. In the following text piece, Charles explores through words her personal response to the exhibition and archival images. See more about the companion artwork, The Strata of Many Truths, on page 96. Generously supported by a City of Vancouver Creative City Strategic Grant. Roxanne Charles of Semiahmoo First Nation is a cultural historian employing means of visual representation, oral history, and ceremony. 18 CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
photographs tell? What pictures remain unseen? What images never made it to the archives? Ask yourself, whose perspective do these photographs show? What narrative do they tell? What do they want us to see? Or perhaps even more importantly: What do they not want us to see? What are the truths left untold? Where are the voices of those who have been silenced? How can we honour all those who became lost within these walls . . . those who never made it home? We choose to honour both the Survivors and those who never made it home to their loved ones. It is our deep respect and admiration for their tremendous beauty, creativity, and resistance. The Indigenous students and their artworks shown in the There Is Truth Here exhibit offer a glimpse into the strength of young children—a strength that continues to flow through the veins of our little ones today. If you are open enough to seeing beyond the image, you may learn to see with your heart, listen with your body, speak with your spirit, and love with every ounce of your soul. Today, the RCMP continue to remove Indigenous families off their land in the name of “progress,” “prosperity,” and “development,” perpetuating assimilative mandates, using brutal force, hurting our women and children . . . never learning from their past mistakes. Within our museum walls, we must remember, we must understand that this is not just about the past. We cannot mourn, sympathize, and regret a dark era while continuing to allow our government to simultaneously execute one. There are many truths here. 18 Gathering Grapes, 1920, donated by Joe Siah (Sto:lo),Museum of Vancouver Collection, pic.861.001 19 Untitled (Girls in the Vineyard), donated by Joe Siah (Sto:lo), Museum of Vancouver Collection, pic.883.001 19 Articles 62–63
ACTS OF LOOKING: AT THE INTERSECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEDICINE Sara K. MacLellan Since its invention in the early nineteenth century, photography has had a long and complex relationship with medicine. Whereas medicine had traditionally relied on artists to depict the body’s unseen interior and record visual signs of disease, the advent of photography—with its apparent elimination of artistic mediation— seemed to have offered medical practitioners the ability to achieve “direct” and “truthful” representation. The camera quickly became the perfect scientific tool, far exceeding the artist’s hand at accurately recording the look of bodily structure and disease. As a seemingly indexical medium tied directly to the reality it represents, photography promised to fulfil medicine’s goal of visual objectivity. One of the most striking historical uses of photography in medicine was by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893). Professing to be “nothing more than a photographer” who inscribed what he saw, Charcot famously produced exhaustive photographic studies of hysterical female patients at the Salpêtrière, an asylum for insane and incurable women in late nineteenth-century Paris.¹ Hysteria—now widely recognized as a socially constructed disease invented out of both professional and sexual desire—had long been used to pathologize a diverse range of conditions and deviant behaviours in women. But physicians were unable to locate an anatomical or corporeal basis for the mystifying affliction. Charcot sought to uncover its “truth” by photographing female patients in various stages of hysterical fits—often provoking the spectacular symptoms he sought to record. By using photography to bring the otherwise invisible disease into representation, Charcot secured the hysterical body as an object of medical study—but also one of public spectacle. In its heyday, with its in-house photography studios pumping out pictures and its female patients performing live for audiences during Charcot’s famous Tuesday lectures, the Salpêtrière was a “living museum of pathology” in which both doctor and patient had starring roles. And Charcot was its visuel—a man who sees, and thus knows.² Yet far from merely observing hysteria, Charcot and his team of photographers played an active role in its construction as a highly sexualized and characteristically female disease. The nineteenth-century invention of hysteria by way of its visual representation serves as a cautionary tale about the role of photography in the construction of medical ideas and scientific claims to objectivity. Interrogating medicine’s representational practices, contemporary artists have taken up the visual iconography produced by Charcot and other men of positivist science, inserting a politics of subjectivity into medicine’s regimes of knowledge about the body to offer expanded accounts of embodied experience. Their work presents critical reflections on how the human body is understood and represented, and is often unforgiving. But in some instances, the contemporary intersection between photography and medicine is seemingly more benign, and much more familiar than we might realize. Celebrated Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog—best known for his mid twentieth-century street photography using Kodachrome 1 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 29. 2 Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 26 and 17. Sara K. MacLellan is an art historian, writer, and artist-maker based in Port Moody, BC. CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
20 Photograph of Augustine (“Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture”), planche XXX, from Bourneville et Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1878), Wellcome Collection (CCBY-4.0) 20 Articles 64 – 6 5
colour slide film—worked as a medical photographer by day. Surely the impact of his clinical training to document medical procedures, devices, and specimens with exacting detail was not lost on his artistic work. Documenting daily urban life in Vancouver as he observed it in the 1950s and ’60s, his vibrant and masterfully executed photographs have a pared-down aesthetic. They speak of a certain kind of truth, a desire to see things as they are—not unlike the medical photographer, whose role is to present “facts” objectively according to the visual codes of medical illustration. After training with Herzog as an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, the photoconceptualist Theodore Wan produced a complex series of medical photographs exploring the body and its subjection to medicine’s disciplinary procedures between 1977 and 1979. These large-format, technically precise black-and-white photographs mimic the visual language of medical illustration, staging diagnostic and preparatory procedures with the artist himself as the “patient.” Produced while he was a graduate student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, the images were born of a partnership between art and medicine. As a trained medical photographer, Wan gained access to the operating facilities at the Dalhousie Medical School in exchange for contributing a set of prints for teaching purposes. The resulting self-portrait photographic series plays on the ambivalent status of the medical photograph as both document and art object, as well as on the patient as both the object and the subject of the medical gaze. In 1989, Montreal artist Nicole Jolicoeur exhibited La Vérité Folle at the Presentation House Gallery (now The Polygon Gallery) in North Vancouver, a photo-based body of work that is part of an ongoing investigation into Charcot’s theories of female hysteria. Developed largely in response to a concurrent exhibition, Masterpieces of Medical Photography, which presented selections from the Burns Archive of early medical photographs, the series seeks to destabilize the effects of “truth” and “objectivity” associated with medical photography. Jolicoeur appropriates and reconfigures archival photographs of Charcot’s famous female hysterics, unveiling the ideologies embedded in early photographic renderings of the body and illustrating how theories of hysteria—like any medical condition—are based on the act of looking. Contemporary photo-based investigations into the history of medicine’s representational practices shift the focus from the 21 CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
22 21 & 22 Theodore Wan, Basic Surgical Positions, 1977, 2 of 11 silver gelatin prints, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund content of the photographic image to its making. They remind us that photographs are never disembodied views from nowhere, but are objects created from a particular position in a particular time and place. That is, there is no such thing as an unmediated photograph or a disinterested viewer, but only highly specific visual possibilities and partial perspectives based on who is looking and from where. This shift in focus also demands that we look deeper into the photographic image to the ideas, ideologies, and institutions behind its production. Of course, this self-consciously critical act of looking is not always easy or comfortable to perform. But the invitation for us to do so shows that contemporary photography is rife with possibilities for opening new modes of understanding and visualizing our bodies outside of any historically or objectively fixed representation—ones that allow for, and even invite, different and multiple points of view. Exhibitions exploring the body through photography in Capture 2019 include Dan Jackson's What It Is (p. 102), Josema Zamorano's Encounters (p. 86), and Cindy Baker's Crash Pad and Trucker Bombs (p. 75), as well as Elizabeth Milton's performance A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes (p. 52) and Birthe Piontek's public art installation Lacuna (p. 32). See Fred Herzog’s street photography at Equinox Gallery (p. 97). Articles 66–67
Hua Jin has the eye of a photographer, the detail of an archivist, and the curiosity of an explorer. Her practice is lens-based, though her photographs show a preoccupation with natural forms, her images bordering on the sculptural. Jin is a collector—of places, people, and sentiments— captured on medium-format film. Her current series is Dundee (2017–), a project anchored in the research of Scottish settlers who founded Dundee, Quebec, around 1800 and named the township after their hometown. Jin’s work traces historical connections between the two Dundees, specifically through the Fraser family archive. The series is a visual essay about immigration and history. Jin received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Visual Art in 2012, in the same year she completed a BFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She holds an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, where she continues to live. In December 2018, the Conseil des arts de Montréal awarded Jin with the inaugural Cultural Diversity in Visual Arts Award. FRAMING DUNDEE: AN INTERVIEW WITH HUA JIN Hua Jin and Brit Bachmann BB What has your experience been as an artist in Montreal? HJ To be honest, it’s tough because I don’t speak French. If you don’t speak the language, it’s not easy to get into the community. When I received the Cultural Diversity in Visual Arts Award, it was a big surprise because I haven’t gotten enough exposure in Montreal. I feel that may start to change after this award. BB The Cultural Diversity in Visual Arts Award seems to be a bold admission that there isn’t as much diversity in the Montreal art scene as there should be. HJ Yes, it’s a first step in a new direction. In 2017, the Conseil released a report and there was a conference to talk about how artists from diverse backgrounds don’t often have shows or get exposure. That’s why they created this award, to promote artists from what they call “invisible” minorities. The main struggle here in Quebec is still between English-speaking and French-speaking communities. For artists from other cultural backgrounds, it’s not easy. BB Your project for Capture 2019 is based on an immigrant experience, that of Scottish settlers in Dundee, Quebec. It intimately documents one family in a very specific place. How did you become aware of the Frasers and Dundee? Brit Bachmann is a writer and artist based in Vancouver. 23 CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
HJ One of my friends is from there. He talked about the history, and then I discovered a very interesting historical archive—there’s a book about Dundee written by a local resident and Scottish dissident. I can relate to it because I myself moved to Canada, but from China. Before this, I had another project documenting family, My Big Family (2010–). Dundee is my second long-term project, this one about immigration, identity, and family. I’m interested because there’s a chance for me to dig deep. BB As an artist, you are inserting yourself into a family history that you are also documenting. How have you approached the subject matter? HJ What made me begin this project was that I had access to this place, to this story, to the people who live there. Of course, the scenery is very beautiful—that was a starting point. I am always interested in nature and landscape, but I’m also interested in the stories. This project is one part photodocumentation and another part research. It’s still ongoing. I don’t know when I’m going to finish it. BB Aesthetically, Dundee seems to be in dialogue with the romanticization of the Canadian landscape and early settlers, especially the fixation on cabin structures. HJ Actually, in this series I include a picture of a painting of Scottish settlers in North America, and you can see that they’re going through a hard time. The beautiful land in my pictures was originally forest, and they cut all the trees and moved all the rocks. It’s hard to photograph the hard times in history. That’s why I include historical archives, to tell the stories of all the work that went into it. 23 Hua Jin, William Fraser and Grandfather, from the series Dundee, 2017–,.inkjet print Dundee runs from April 6 to May 11 at Viridian Gallery as part of Capture 2019 (p. 99). This interview has been edited for clarity. Articles 68–69
2019 TD CURATOR HIGHLIGHTS This year at Capture, the lineup of Vancouver artists will inspire you to think about Vancouver’s history, representation, and identity and the ways in which these contemporary artists are expressing themselves through new mediums and perspectives in public space. Capture is a reminder of the role that artists and curators play in transporting people from the present to a place where they can reflect on the undercurrents of what is happening in their community and engage with art on a daily commute or through a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The exhibitions that resonate with TD are Deanna Bowen’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Tom Hsu’ installation at Waterfront Canada Line Station, Alana Paterson’s installation at Chinatown– Stadium SkyTrain Station, and Birthe Piontek’s installation at Broadway–City Hall Canada Line Station. These projects encourage dialogue about Vancouver and the unique intersection of time we find ourselves sharing. Stuart Keeler Senior Art Curator, TD Bank Group 1 Tom Hsu, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, 2018 2 Alana Patterson, Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball, 2018 3 Deanna Bowen, Theatre Under the Stars’ cast photo from Finian’s Rainbow, circa 1953, 2019 4 Birthe Piontek, Lacuna, 2018 1 4 CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL
TD Curator Highlights 70– 71 Deanna Bowen A HARLEM NOCTURNE Contemporary Art Gallery (see p.48) Alana Paterson SKWXWÚ7MESH NATION BASKETBALL Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station and The Polygon Gallery (see p.26) Tom Hsu AN URGE TO PROPOSE FORBIDDEN THOUGHTS AND PLAYING WITH FIRE Waterfront Canada Line Station, (see p. 29) Birthe Piontek LACUNA Broadway–City Hall Canada Line Station, (see p. 32) 3 2
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019
Fred Herzog, Man with Cane, 1961, archival pigment print, 12″ × 18″, Courtesy of Equinox Gallery, Vancouver 72 – 73
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 The Selected Exhibition Program features participating photography and lens-based exhibitions at galleries, museums, and other venues across Metro Vancouver. The program is chosen by jury, who evaluated submissions according to five criteria: concept, artistic excellence, curatorial vision, and overall impact. 2019 Jury Emmy Lee Wall Assistant Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery Denise Ryner Director/Curator, Or Gallery Carol Sawyer Artist
Selected Exhibitions 74– 75 Cindy Baker is an interdisciplinary and performance artist whose work explores gender culture, queer theory, fat activism, and art theory, often with a focus on the ways weakening, disabled, obese, or otherwise socially taboo bodies fail to meet the demands of capitalist consumer culture. The Crash Pad and Trucker Bombs exhibition includes two distinct but related bodies of work. Crash Pad (2018) is a combination of photography, video, drawing, and custom wallpaper that depicts scenes of loving, domestic intimacy between everyday women with disabilities and chronic health issues. This is accompanied by an installation of Trucker Bombs (2014), a series of photo lightboxes that speaks to the pressures put on even able bodies to perform productivity under capitalism. Each lightbox depicts a bottle of glowing yellow liquid in the landscape; such vessels are often thrown onto highways by long-haul drivers who, under pressure to drive ever longer hours, choose to forego regular pit stops. Cindy Baker, Trucker Bomb 10, 2014, digital photo transparency lightbox, 14″ × 10″ Reach Gallery Museum 32388 Veterans Way, Abbotsford Tu, W, F: 10 am–5 pm; Th: 10 am–9 pm; Sa&Su: 12–5 pm; M: closed On until May 5 Curated by Adrienne Fast CRASH PAD AND TRUCKER BOMBS Cindy Baker
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 (IN) SITE (In) Site presents a number of large-scale photos that document emerging artist Stephanie Patsula’s recent performances in remote wilderness areas. For these works, she manipulates her body using mirrors and multiple-exposure techniques to create uncanny, manipulated forms that express a bodily unease and lost identity in relation to the natural environment. As visitors enter the exhibition space to view these photographs of Patsula’s body in the landscape, their images are reflected by an ornate mirror onto a large-scale backdrop of the Alberta Badlands, thus implicating the viewers’ own bodies into the tensions that Patsula’s images articulate. Stephanie Patsula, Untitled, 2018, C-print Reach Gallery Museum 32388 Veterans Way, Abbotsford Tu, W, F: 10 am–5 pm; Th: 10 am–9 pm; Sa&Su: 12–5 pm; M: closed On until May 5 Stephanie Patsula Curated by Adrienne Fast
Selected Exhibitions 76 – 77 Adad Hannah’s The Decameron Retold (2019) is a new work commissioned by the Richmond Art Gallery based on the fourteenth-century literary work The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. The medieval collection of novellas comprises one hundred tales told over ten days by ten young women and men sequestered in a villa outside of Florence to escape the black plague. For the exhibition, Hannah has created a series of video tableaux vivants using Boccaccio’s frame narrative as the departure point. Working with community members in front of and behind the camera and incorporating local stories gathered through an open call, the artist invited participants to lay their own stories over The Decameron’s structure. This new narrative expands Hannah’s typical improvisational approach to production and community engagement. Hannah is well known for his photographic and video works that explore the performative and cinematic potential of tableaux vivants. He has produced community-based projects around the world, from Senegal to Australia to the United States, as well as across Canada. This is his first large-scale community project in the Lower Mainland. Adad Hannah, The Decameron Retold (after Il Decamerone, Falkman), 2019, Courtesy of Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal Richmond Art Gallery 7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond M–F: 10 am–6 pm Sa&Su: 10 am–5 pm On until April 20 Curated by Nan Capogna THE DECAMERON RETOLD Adad Hannah This project is generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts New Chapter program and was produced with the support of the Richmond Art Gallery and the community of Richmond.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Faces of Survival presents a commissioned series of portraits of Holocaust survivors by Pulitzer Prize– winning photojournalist Marissa Roth. Holocaust survivor volunteers and families of survivors who have passed met with Roth to have their photographs taken. It was important to both the artist and curatorial team that the project also include survivor volunteers who have passed away. Family members where possible held a photograph of their loved ones, to preserve their presence and link the generations. The result is powerful: the forty portraits depict the survivors—including Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) outreach speakers, board members, and volunteers, both past and present—in a unique and powerful way. The close-up portraits, in particular the survivors’ eyes, tell us about pain, loss, and suffering. They also express kindness, hope, resilience, and the victory of the human spirit. Following the portrait sessions, the survivors and descendants were asked two questions: What message do you want to convey to students of the VHEC? And, why is it important to remember the Holocaust? The curatorial team then selected quotations from the answers to accompany the portraits. The diversity of the messages from the survivors and descendants is powerful: they remind us to commemorate and honour the ones who perished, to not forget those who rescued them, and to not remain silent but to take action against any kind of discrimination and persecution. They also prompt us to regard education as key in preventing racism and anti-Semitism, to never take democracy and human rights for granted, and, simply, to tell our families that we love them. Marissa Roth, Leon Kahn, 2018, b/w matted, framed, archival silver gelatin print, 20″ × 24″, Copyright Marissa Roth FACES OF SURVIVAL Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre Lower Level, Jewish Community Centre 50-950 W 41st Ave, Vancouver M–Th: 9 am–5 pm; Fri: 9 am–4 pm; Sa&Su: closed Admission by donation (suggested $5) On until June 30 Curated by Nina Krieger and Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar Marissa Roth
Selected Exhibitions 78– 79 Finding My Father at Yongpyong presents a series of works by Vancouver-based artist Taehoon Kim that captures a journey of personal and familial exploration through photography. From 1974 to 1993, the artist’s father, Kwahn W. Kim, worked as the chief architect of Yongpyong Ski Resort, one of the host sites of the 2018 Winter Olympics. When it opened, Yongpyong became the first ski resort in South Korea, marking a turning point in the country’s history where everyday Koreans could afford leisure activities—a remarkable feat considering the country's economic condition following the Korean War of the 1950s. When Kim’s father retired, his family immigrated to Canada. Although the artist knew Yongpyong was one of his father’s great accomplishments, they rarely discussed it. The artist feels that he and his father lived the story many first-generation immigrants know too well: with fewer and fewer places to find common ground, they drifted apart in their new home country. Kwahn W. Kim died in 2005 after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. For the artist, the hardest part of mourning was realizing he had barely known his father. When Pyeongchang was named the host of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, Kim went to see the resort he had heard so much about growing up. He wanted to learn more about his dad by spending time in the place where he had poured his heart and soul. In the photographs of Finding My Father at Yongpyong, the artist hopes to capture his father’s spirit, presence, and legacy. Taehoon Kim, Finding My Father at Yongpyong #5, 2018, digital photography, 12″ × 16″ FINDING MY FATHER AT YONGPYONG North Vancouver District Public Library 1277 Lynn Valley Rd, North Vancouver M–F: 9 am–9 pm; Sa: 9 am–5 pm; Su: 12–5 pm Reception Thu, Apr 11, 6–8 pm On until April 29 Curated by North Van Arts Taehoon Kim Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 LIQUID LANDSCAPES Surrey Art Gallery UrbanScreen 13458 107A Ave, Surrey M–Su: 30 min. after sunset until midnight Curated by Rhys Edwards Nicolas Sassoon The latest site-specific artwork at Surrey Art Gallery’s offsite venue UrbanScreen highlights the natural beauty of Surrey’s parks, beaches, and rivers. On display on the west wall of Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre, Liquid Landscapes (2018) captures the essence of local geography through pixel animations. Inspired by photographs of seven key geographic sites around Surrey—such as Redwood Park, Nicomekl River, and Serpentine Fen—digital artist Nicolas Sassoon has created a series of hypnotic animations specifically for UrbanScreen. Changing every night, the animations invoke rippling reflections, flowing waves, and the growth and decay of foliage. Sassoon renders the scenes in limited but vibrant colours informed by each location as well as by the retro, pixelated look of early web design. Condensing each location into a series of colours and shapes, Sassoon’s abstraction offers up impressions of Surrey’s natural environment while alluding to how digital images shape our own experience of the world. Ever more frequently, we observe nature through a lens, whether holding cameras in front of our faces or scrolling through friends’ pictures on social media. Liquid Landscapes illustrates the ascendance of data visualization methods and their mediation of real places. The artwork is visible every night from half an hour after sunset until midnight and can be seen on site and from the SkyTrain. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by curator Rhys Edwards, as part of the Surrey Art Gallery Presents publication series, available for free download from the gallery’s website at surrey.ca/artgallery. Nicolas Sassoon, Serpentine River, still from Liquid Landscapes animation, 2018, digital animation installation view, image Courtesy of SITE Photography On until April 28
Selected Exhibitions 80–81 FOUND/HELD Access Gallery 222 E Georgia St, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su&M: closed On until April 13 Curated by Katie Belcher Group Exhibition found/held presents work by Alan Bartol (Calgary), Lindsay Dobbin (Bay of Fundy), Ursula Handleigh (Halifax), and Pavitra Wickramasinghe (Montreal). Considering these works through a drawing lens, this exhibition investigates the artists’ use of concrete materials (iron, water, air) to capture phenomena (waves, breathe, energy). Inspired by reading about the disappearing skill of wave pilots in the Marshall Islands—specially trained in the ancient art of reading the waves by feel and sight—Wickramasinghe’s Coral bones/La mer (2018) is a return to these innate navigation skills and of the body to the environment. Dobbin’s practice of drumming the surface of the Bay of Fundy is reflected in their sound works, sometimes using a single strike of a drum to create a spacious soundscape. Through animated iron-filing videos, Bartol reimagines dowsing (also known as water-witching) as a technology for remediation of contaminated land. Lastly, Handleigh uses experiential photography and alternative processes of image-making to record personal histories, such as capturing the pacing of her walking breath on photographic paper. Ursula Handleigh, I can feel you forgetting, 2017, steel, rust, and breath, Courtesy of the artist
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Enter the world that Amalie Atkins built. Set just beyond the veil of reality, a familiar prairie landscape transforms into a cinematic fable. In Atkins’s marvelous realm, an all-female cast embarks on an epic, bittersweet journey across time. For over eight years, Atkins has been devotedly creating we live on the edge of disaster and imagine we are in a musical (2010–), for which the artist choreographs individual chapters into a circuitous, continuous plot. Atkins knits together autobiography with cultural history, fantasy with reality, and the conceptual with the emotional. The exhibition where the hour floats presents a selection of short films and large-format photographs from this larger, ongoing body of work. Atkins’s work draws the viewer into a secret world that unfolds through moving and still images. The artist captures what Victor LaValle describes in his novel The Changeling as an “intimacy so acute it is almost magical.” Exchanges among her characters— mother and daughter, sisters young and old, folk dancers, and mythical Valkyries—illustrate a deep-rooted connection to one another that is both physical and psychological. The story is told through tender gestures and symbolic rituals, by which the artist makes strange everyday objects: a collection of kitchen aprons, a pair of roller skates, a plait of long hair. Scenes from this fairy tale unfold with sinister undertones, for like any heroine’s journey, this one involves both allies and enemies. In its telling, Atkins’s story poetically attends to the human condition: the bonds of sisterhood, trauma confronted from internal and external forces, belonging, notions of home, and ancestral ties to the motherland. Amalie Atkins, The Summoning, 2013, chromogenic print, 40″ × 50″, Courtesy of the artist WHERE THE HOUR FLOATS Art Gallery at Evergreen 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam W–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su: 12–4 pm; M&Tu: closed On until April 21 Curated by Katherine Dennis Amalie Atkins Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.
Selected Exhibitions 82 –83 The exhibition The Box Project acts a contextual underlay to Ryan Quast’s material explorations in which he elevates low objects through a complex, attentive, and laborious process of layering and sculpting paint into replicated “anti-readymades.” Many of the sculptures depict objects commonly found in the studio that are not “art” as well as hoarded objects from domestic contexts. The Box Project comprises a series of photographs of boxes of possessions left behind by the artist in the streets and alleys of Vancouver, which are often dismal settings in direct contrast to the city’s “picturesque” reputation. Each photograph is paired with a typewritten list of the hoarded objects found within the discarded box it pictures. The series both informs the aesthetic of Quast’s sculptural paint works and investigates the artist’s compulsion to dump his personal possessions in this manner. The cumulative effect of these photographs is to illustrate scenes at the fringes of society; the box can be read as a visual metaphor of the experience of economic decline or social coldness experienced in downtrodden areas across many North American cities. The exhibition is a concentrated show of only fifteen Polaroid and Fuji Instax photograph and text diptychs out of the thousands of images in this series, which has been ongoing since 2003. Many of the discarded objects from the boxes have found their way back into the artist’s practice, becoming part of his sculptural oeuvre as stand-ins. Quast explains, “I am interested in how we represent things around us and personalize them. My objects embody the idea of how our need to work, to be productive, contributes to our sense of identity, but I don’t co-opt other people’s experiences. By reconstructing objects that we’re all familiar with, I’m hoping people can slip easily into the work and think about these ideas.” Ryan Quast, List 253 and Polaroid 253, from The Box Project, 2003– Wil Aballe Art Projects 1129 E Hastings St, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su&M: closed Closing Reception Sat, Apr. 20, 2–4 pm March 15–April 20 THE BOX PROJECT Ryan Quast
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Lynne Cohen is best known for her photographs of institutional interior spaces. Generally inaccessible to the public, these spaces have included medical laboratories, private offices, factories, shooting ranges, and military installations. This exhibition represents the first time in several decades that Cohen’s work has been exhibited on the West Coast. Including loans from the Canada Council Art Bank, the estate of Lynne Cohen, and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, this exhibition brings together work from the 1970s through to the early 2000s. Cohen was born in Racine, Wisconsin, and lived and worked in Canada from 1973 until her death in 2014. She was the recipient of numerous awards of merit, including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2005. Lynne Cohen, Laboratory, 1999, dye coupler printed, 43.5″ × 50.5″ , Courtesy of the estate of Lynne Cohen and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto Burnaby Art Gallery 6344 Deer Lake Ave, Burnaby Tu–F: 10 am–4:30 pm; Sa&Su: 12–5 pm; M: closed Opening Reception Thu, Mar 14, 7–9 pm March 15–April 21 Curated by Jennifer Cane THESE WALLS Lynne Cohen
Selected Exhibitions 84–85 In 1966, Vancouver-based artist Jim Breukelman photographed patrons at a diner in Pawtuket, Rhode Island, over an extended period of time. The diner, located in an industrial area, was frequented by factory workers and truckers. At the time, Breukelman was completing his degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he noted that his generation leaned toward the counterculture end of the spectrum, while the people who ate at the diner did not. Breukelman observed that different groups would gather throughout the day depending on their place in the hierarchy at the nearby plants—labourers in the morning, followed by managers, and so on. In 1999, Breukelman revisited this series, transforming it into an artist book in which he printed images onto pages using a T-shirt transfer technique. The pages in the book are contained in a case that resembles the Formica counter at the diner. In this exhibition, Breukelman revisits the diner series once again, installed alongside three, more recent series of photographs of called After Life, Mesocosm, and Planted Life. While to some people these works and those of the diner series may seem politically charged, Breukelman asserts that they are instead born out of curiosity and are apolitical: “Each begins with the unexpected discovery of evidence showing how humankind’s ideas about nature eventually manifest themselves physically in the world.” Jim Breukelman, Mesocosm 5, 2005, digital C-print, 50″ × 60″, Courtesy of the artist ALTERED STATES West Vancouver Art Museum 680 17th St, West Vancouver Tu–Sa: 11 am–5 pm Su&M: closed Opening Reception Tue, Mar 19, 7–9 pm March 20–May 11 Curated by Darrin Morrison Jim Breukelman
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 At once constructing and appealing to a common understanding of space, photography has a longstanding role in documentary practice. Theories abound regarding the fabrication of truth and the position of the artist in relation to the image-asdocument, such as in street photography—a genre alluded to by the works presented in Encounters. Yet in such photographs spaces are generally depicted as static; their animation is seldom considered. Josema Zamorano’s work highlights fluctuations in the appearance of space and responds to how we come to know place as lived experience. The gestural layering and repeated folding back onto itself of place, as recorded in these images, results from the artist’s photographic approach, which he calls “spacial sculpting.” Using the photographic apparatus as a sensorial extension of his body, the artist moves about the spaces he encounters, scanning the scene back and forth in an ongoing negotiation of the street as a living and ever shifting locale. This form of inquiry mirrors the perceptual act itself, tracing the saccades of the eye as it consumes visual inputs. Through a methodology rooted in existential phenomenology, Zamorano looks at the ephemeral space between the world and ourselves. Here, the task is not depicting reality but rather investigating and documenting the fleeting experience of seeing that constructs our world. In this solo exhibition, Zamorano presents renderings of his encounters with space while on residency in Berlin during the summers of 2016 and 2018 Josema Zamorano, Encounters #3,2018, pigment inkjet print on watercolour cotton rag, 17″ × 24.5″ Mónica Reyes Gallery 602 E Hastings St, Vancouver W–F: 11 am–5 pm; Sa & Su Apr 14: 1–5 pm & by appt Opening Reception Fri, Mar 29, 7–9 pm March 29–April 14 Curated by Annie Briard ENCOUNTERS Josema Zamorano
Selected Exhibitions 86–87 Documented during a trip to Rome in 2010, these large-scale photographs by Mike Grill capture a city in motion, where the memory of the ancient city confronts modern society and evolving technologies. The subjects of the photographs were captured spontaneously as they went about their daily lives, depicting the events and personalities of the ordinary world. The gestures of those observed are suggestive of a larger narrative that underlies and informs the moment, presenting sophisticated layers through which each image can be perceived. Rome presents images reflective of dissonance between the modern and ancient worlds, which gives way to questioning what it is that defines us through time. Grill works primarily with black-and-white photography, using both digital and traditional photographic processes and printing techniques to document scenes of the vernacular world, of the day to day, and of the people that inhabit it. His serendipitous imagery has a tendency to recall figurative works and techniques from the traditional canon, while still remaining firmly embedded in the present day. Mike Grill, A Pair of Nuns, 2018, silver gelatin print mounted on stretched canvas with acrylic border, 38.5″ × 48.5″ ROME Fine Art Framing & Services 100-1000 Parker St, Vancouver M–F: 9 am–5 pm; Sa: 12–5 pm; Su: closed Opening Reception Fri, Mar 29, 6–9 pm March 29–May 10 Presented by Patron Art House and Fine Art Framing & Services Mike Grill
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 The News Photographers Association of Canada (NPAC) celebrates and champions quality and ethical photography in journalism. Through a variety of efforts, the association challenges its members to better themselves and to continually raise the bar of industry standards. NPAC hosts the annual National Pictures of the Year awards (NPOY) each spring. This event is the largest annual photo contest in Canada and it showcases the best work of NPAC’s members. It also recognizes the Photojournalist of the Year, Photograph of the Year, and Student Photographer of the Year. The awards competition provides members with important peer review of their work as well as helps them stay current with trends and techniques in photojournalism. It has become the largest photojournalism competition, for both still photography and multimedia, in the country. The images in this exhibition represent the finalists for the NPOY, and the winners will be announced at the NPOY Gala to be held at The Polygon Gallery on April 13 (see p. 126). Chris Donovan for MacLean's magazine, 2018. Pendulum Gallery 885 W Georgia St, Vancouver M–W: 9 am–6 pm; Th&F: 9 am–9 pm; Sa: 9 am–5 pm; Su: closed Opening Reception Thu, Apr 11, 6–9 pm April 1–26 Curated by Ali Ledgerwood and Ric Ernst NPAC NATIONAL PICTURES OF THE YEAR NOMINEES Group Exhibition Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.
Selected Exhibitions 88–89 Nightcrawl examines how the artificial lights of the night bring attention to otherwise ordinary subjects through their dramatic lighting. Using a tripod during the winter evenings, Dane Murner shot scenes with a balance of cool and warm light in the alleys and streets of Vancouver. The result is images that are delicate with subtle details that together pull in the viewer. Dane Murner, Lobby Flower, 2018, laser lightjet chromogenic print, 11″ × 16.5″ NIGHTCRAWL Charles Clark Gallery Strange Fellows Brewing 1345 Clark Dr, Vancouver M–Th: 4–11 pm; F–Su: 12–11 pm Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 7–9 pm April 1–29 Dane Murner
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Julie F Hill is a British artist who employs an expanded approach to the photographic medium, creating sculptural installations that explore conceptions of deep space and cosmological time. The astronomical image is shaped into formations that resemble uncanny meteorological or geological phenomena, creating immensities that we can walk among or enter into. Enigmatic and illusory materials such as mirrors act as conduits or portals, inviting us to cross a threshold to experience the unknowable. Through such environments Hill questions scientific images and the technologies used to construct them. The Space Out of Time considers the idea of cosmic immensity in relation to conceptions of time in astronomy, which as a discipline is rooted in the practice of “looking back in time” through the practice of using telescopic mirrors to collect celestial light that has travelled millions of light years to reach us. Julie F Hill, Mirror Darkness, 2017, installation view at Lumen Studios, London Terminal Creek Contemporary 569 Artisan Lane, Bowen Island F–Su: 12–4 pm; M–Th: closed Opening Reception Sat, Apr 13, 12–4 pm April 3–17 THE SPACE OUT OF TIME Julie F Hill
Selected Exhibitions 90–91 Unearthing, Folding, and Burning contains varying approaches to the still life genre through experiments in material, process, animation, and depiction. Torrie Groening unearths fragments of shattered objects, which are then meticulously scanned and arranged into multilayered digital prints. Gerri York folds photosensitive paper into origami shapes, exposes them to light, and unfolds them. Ryan Peter paints onto film and uses cutout shapes to control the exposure of light onto sheets of photo paper. Groening’s work is centred on pottery shards that she dug up from her yard in Strathcona, Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood, consisting of pieces of Chinese, Japanese, and English pottery with similar cobalt-blue glazes in very different patterns. These treasures are given new life as physical evidence of local history and a starring role in above-ground still life. York’s work examines the creation of folds in origami structures made from photo paper and, later, the accidental and phenomenological result of unfolding. These three-dimensional forms are first exposed to light in the darkroom, and then unfolded and processed as two-dimensional photographs. These resulting black, grey, and white abstractions of the original origami forms exploit a simpler and more subjective presentation of interiority and exteriority, resulting in light-infused, open-ended forms, infinite boundaries, and the mere suggestion of the original sculpture, now reduced to its unfolded and abstracted photographic form. Peter’s work uses a contact photo-printing process, whereby acrylic paints, chemicals, and industrial materials are placed atop translucent plastic film in the darkroom. His enigmatic prints draw on the shifting relationship between physical and digital forms while simultaneously evoking a sense of tension between the natural and urban realms, and exploring the ways humans intersect with them. Gerri York, Crane 1, 2018, photogram, 24″ × 24″ Malaspina Printmakers 1555 Duranleau St, Vancouver M–F: 10 am–5 pm; Sa&Su: 11 am–5 pm Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 6–9 pm Torrie Groening Ryan Peter Gerri York April 4–May 5 UNEARTHING, FOLDING, AND BURNING Curated by Justin Muir
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 In 2010, curator Dr. Ihor Holubizky and artist Christos Dikeakos developed a project drawn from Dikeakos’s thirty-plus years of research and studio work circulating through Marcel Duchamp’s proposition of the “inframince” and the effects of psychoactive substances on creative and imaginative artistic production. The resulting exhibition, which travelled to three public galleries in Ontario and Prince Edward Island, included a full spectrum of mediums— sculpture, drawing, text-based work—all grounded by Dikeakos’s ongoing photographic practices. Patisserie Duchamp revisits and orchestrates a reimagined version of the original exhibition, this time focusing on and thinking through the camera-based elements: documentary black-and-white photography, conceptual and conceptualized camerawork, and photo collage. This is the first time the work has been shown in Vancouver. Christos Dikeakos, “Patteasserie” Duchamp après que, Nude Descending a Staircase No 1, 1970–2009, inkjet photo collage, 16″ × 20″ Chernoff Fine Art 265 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver M–F: 10:30 am–5:30 pm; Sa: 12–5 pm; Su: closed Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 6–9 pm April 4–May 9 PATISSERIE DUCHAMP Christos Dikeakos Curated by Brad Chernoff and Karen Kolenda
Selected Exhibitions 92–93 To coincide with the publication and launch of his new book Tokyo–Yokosuka 1976–1983, Greg Girard presents an exhibition of selected photographs from the series. Girard has spent much of his career in Asia, and his work examines the social and physical transformations taking place throughout the region. Delving into his extensive archive of photographs, the artist has gathered his best and most notable images of Tokyo and Yokosuka from 1976 to 1983. The artist first arrived in Tokyo in 1976, intending to stay a day or two on his way to Southeast Asia. Arriving by train to the bright lights of Shinjuku, Girard wandered the streets all night, looking more than photographing—but by morning he had decided he was going to stay. These photographs are the result of that decision by a twenty-year-old photographer, and for the following years the momentum from that first impression turned the artist loose in two cities he has never tired of photographing. During this time, Girard also started photographing in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, where the US Seventh Fleet is based. The photographs in Tokyo–Yokosuka 1976–1983 are about the place the artist was living in at the time. Of course, almost nobody saw them during this period. It would be years later before Girard started making a living as a magazine photographer, and many years after that before he started to consider this early, mostly unpublished work from Japan worth revisiting. As a young photographer, Girard felt that photographs should be revealing to the people who live in the place being photographed as well as to any imagined audience “back home” or anywhere else. That point of view hasn’t really changed. Greg Girard, Tokyo, Akasaka, 1979, Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver Monte Clark Gallery 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 10 am–5:30 pm Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 6–8 pm April 4–May 4 TOKYO–YOKOSUKA 1976–1983 Greg Girard
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 A Firmament presents photographic and sculptural works about the transmission of light, both celestial and terrestrial. Its starting point is the artist’s long-standing fascination with astronomy— dating back to his first purchases of Astronomy magazine at the age of six—coupled with forays into mathematics, religious symbolic systems, and contemporary representations of the transcendent and superterrestrial. The light at play in these works has been mediated through various devices, including the telescope and darkroom enlarger. Included are photo collages from the series The Light of Their Eyes (2016) and Skyreach (2016), conflating mathematical constructs, stained glass motifs, and astrophotography from the Hubble Space Telescope archive. Light Study, a series of experimental photograms initiated during a residency at the Banff Centre in 2017, is based in the geometric systems used to construct Persian decorative patterning. New visual forms founded in this geometry are built through the refractive interference of light, by way of a custom-made darkroom apparatus. Alongside these lens-based works, new sculptural works further an investigation into specular infinity cubes first presented by the artist in 2013. Inspiration is taken from various sources, including the drawings of the seventeenth-century English polymath Robert Fludd, sculpture and drawings by Monir Farmanfarmaian and Timo Nasseri, and photographic experimentation by May Ray and László Maholy-Nagy, in addition to decorative systems using Persian and Islamic geometry. Blaine Campbell, Light Study 20 (In progress), 2018, giclée on dibond, 82″ × 102″ Republic Gallery 732 Richards St, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 10 am–5 pm; Su&M: closed Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 7–9 pm Blaine Campbell April 4–May 11 A FIRMAMENT
Selected Exhibitions 94–95 Over the course of 2018, each member of Iris Film Collective participated in individual month-long residencies to create a 16 mm film loop installation with a view to pushing the boundaries of 16 mm film and projection. The only stipulation was that the work must impose an element of interference. This could include the manipulation of the light between the projector and screen, devices that transform the projection surface, alterations to the mechanism of projection, and the introduction of objects beyond the projection apparatus and film loop. The result is LOOPDALOOP (2019), a stunning and immersive rotating month-long exhibition taking place at Burrard View Park, where the collective is currently on residency as part of the Vancouver Park Board’s Fieldhouse Activation Program. The eight individual works are each exhibited for three nights over the course of the month. Participating artists are Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty, Zoe Kirk-Gushowaty, Alex MacKenzie, Lisa g Nielsen, Nisha Platzer, Sydney Southam, Amanda Thomson, and Ryder White. Iris Film Collective, stills from LOOPDALOOP, 2019, 16 mm film Burrard View Fieldhouse 545 North Slocan St, Vancouver M–Su: 7–9 pm Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 7–9 pm April 4–28 LOOPDALOOP Iris Film Collective Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 Semiahmoo artist Roxanne Charles has drawn inspiration from archival photographs of Indigenous children from the St. Mary’s Indian Residential School, in Mission, BC, to create an art installation in conversation with the exhibition There Is Truth Here: Creativity and Resilience in Children’s Art from Indian Residential and Indian Day Schools at the MOV. At residential schools across Canada, daily academic instruction was limited, because the children’s time and bodies were needed to keep the schools operating. This experience was shared by the children who attended St. Mary’s. The archival photographs behind Charles’s work show the common experience of children who were separated by gender, had their hair cut, and were forced to wear uniforms. Charles’s installation holds space for these Indigenous children. The photos ostensibly provide objective historical documentation of the schools, but all were taken from the perspective of the adult supervisors and staff who ran them. There Is Truth Here examines the other perspective in the story: that of the Survivors of Indian residential schools. Through their artworks, they tell their own stories from their own perspectives. The children’s drawings and paintings show ancestors, horse ranching and rodeos, salmon fishing, boats, empty beaches, and loved ones from home. Some depict the loneliness, isolation, and abuse experienced at the schools. The Survivors’ art and voices provide a deeper understanding of what life was like for children in residential schools and how art offered a chance to express individual creativity. These artworks represent the children’s truth about growing up in these institutions. As intergenerational residential school Survivors, we experience a state of being caught between the struggle of our relatives and the legacy of trauma left in the wake of the residential school system. It is a truth we have inherited and will continue to tell through the works of artists and the children of this exhibition. (Text by Lorilee Wastasecoot, Peguis First Nation) Roxanne Charles, Truth, 2011 Museum of Vancouver 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver M,Tu,Su: 10 am–5 pm; W: 10 am–5 pm; Th: 10 am–8 pm; F&Sa: 10 am–9 pm Museum admission: $9.75 (child)– $20.50 (adult) Opening Reception Fri, Apr 5, 7–9 pm Roxanne Charles April 5–21 THE STRATA OF MANY TRUTHS Generously supported by a City of Vancouver Creative City Strategic Grant.
Selected Exhibitions 96–97 Group Exhibition Primary Colour presents a view of early colour street photography from 1950 to 1979, with works by Fred Herzog, Vivian Maier, Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt, Harry Callahan, Ernst Haas, Saul Leiter, Joel Meyerowitz, and William Eggleston. Each of the photographers included in this exhibition have adopted and adapted the ethos of the flâneur as a wandering observer of the events of urban life. Compelled by the challenge to use colour film in their desire to observe and capture in the very same moment, the candid and striking nature of these photographs blurs the boundary between artistic expression and documentary record. Fred Herzog, Newspaper Readers, 1961, Courtesy of Equinox Gallery, Vancouver Equinox Gallery 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 10 am–5 pm; Su&M: closed Opening Reception Sat, Apr 6, 2–4 pm April 6–May 11 PRIMARY COLOUR
CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2019 The photography exhibition Still Lives Extreme embraces and plays on a Karl Marx maxim that states, “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.” In terms of the idea of aesthetics or a concept of what a to-be-looked-at-ness suggests, the still life is simplistic, as it is basically a portrayal of inanimate objects. Still Lives Extreme is an honest and amusing effort by Vancouver-based artist Dana Hawkes to give utility to objects that have been found, repurposed, and cast in resin. Using lighting, movement, and strategic framing to falsely elevate these objects into what could be considered a form of usefulness, these still lifes play with the idea of the art object. Dana Hawkes, Still Lives Extreme 01, 2018, digital photograph face mounted on aluminum, 16″ × 11″ Cartems Donuts 2190 Main St, Vancouver M–F: 7 am–10 pm; Sa: 9 am–10 pm; Su: 9 am–8 pm Opening Reception Sat, Apr 6, 7–10 pm April 6–28 STILL LIVES EXTREME Dana Hawkes