51 PUBLIC ART Davie St Billboards: Buck Ellison Untitled (Christmas Cards) Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival March 14 – May 4 A multi-site project on two billboards on Davie St, Vancouver, and on four billboards along Dupont St, Toronto Sited on two billboards on Davie St, between Bute St and Jervis St, Vancouver Deploying the visual tropes that make up stock photography, Buck Ellison’s meticulously staged images mimic and draw attention to the pervasive White privilege that has become part of the North American visual vernacular. While at first glance the images on these billboards appear to be ordinary family photos, upon closer examination the overly perfect nature of the people therein, their clothing, and the setting reveals the photograph to be constructed – a work of fiction employing actors rather than kin. In these works, Ellison references the tradition of family portraiture that goes back centuries, and continues in contemporary holiday cards in which professional photographers are hired to snap the “perfect family photo.” In creating these works, the artist makes coded reference to affluence in contemporary society and the ways in which photography is used to propagate and circulate those standards and norms. The artist states: I see portraits as tied to power, marriage, and the merging of family assets from the get-go. My aim is to upend that. The individuals in my family portrait are not related, they met hours before the shoot, and the final image is a composite of multiple shots. I find it unsettling how commonplace this technique is in advertising – a tool used to construct the illusion of perfect families, the very ones that leave us feeling inadequate. The images are especially poignant when writ large and presented on sites typically used for advertising. By reproducing and magnifying both Whiteness and wealth, Ellison asks the viewer to look in the mirror and interrogate our own, sometimes subconscious aspirations. Presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival
Capture 2025 52 Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project Buck Ellison Untitled (Winter), 2023 Courtesy of the Artist Site photo: Toni Hafkenscheid Installation mock-up: Robert Marks
53 PUBLIC ART Dupont St Billboards: Buck Ellison January Effect Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival May 1–31 A multi-site project on two billboards on Davie St, Vancouver, and on four billboards along Dupont St, Toronto Sited on four billboards, with two on the corner of Dupont St and Emerson Ave, one on the corner of Dupont St and Dovercourt Rd, and one on the corner of Dufferin St and Geary Ave, Toronto The four still-life images selected for these billboards relate to the four seasons. Originally, the length of the images corresponded to the length of the day in each season, with Untitled (Winter) being considerably shorter than Untitled (Summer). The images have since been resized to fit the standard billboard format. Each composition considers the way garments and fabrics wield wealth and power and play an important role in shaping global histories. For example, Untitled (Spring) uses items related to the care of garments, such as wool dryer balls and dry cleaning receipts, with tartan private school uniforms, a colonial legacy of the British Empire that has infiltrated former colonies. Untitled (Winter) incorporates an image of John Singleton Copley’s painting titled A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham); the flying squirrel was a common symbol of refinement in the period. During this time, silk was a great luxury, and this fabric was significant in expressing the social standing of the sitter. As such, great care was placed in the depiction of this fabric in the painting. Ellison incorporates tulip petals to mirror the silk in the photograph to emphasize its importance. As in his portraiture, Ellison’s still lifes contain objects that are laden with societal codes and continue his investigation into how Whiteness, wealth, and their attendant privileges are maintained and propagated. Presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival
Capture 2025 54 Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project Jorian Charlton Skai, from the Jamaica series, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Cooper Cole Site photo: Dennis Ha Installation mock-up: Robert Marks
55 PUBLIC ART East Vancouver Billboards: Jorian Charlton With Care Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival March 7 – May 25 A multi-site project on two billboards along E Hastings St between Glen Dr and Vernon Dr, and on one billboard at Clark Dr and Venables St, Vancouver Jorian Charlton’s practice centres on portraiture that celebrates Black culture and community. Working with friends, models, and members of her broader social circle, Charlton continually investigates family, intimacy, human connection, and love. Her images elucidate community by capturing a sense of belonging and that which unites us. While Charlton works across fashion photography and simultaneously maintains her artistic practice, the images selected for the billboards offer a quieter, more contemplative, and less direct feel than the photographs that comprise her commercial work. In her artistic practice, she often features delicate, gentle images of children and young women, such as the back of a child’s head, adorned with a beautiful pink bow, and another of friends in a tender embrace, crafting a decidedly subjective, caring gaze that defines her work. Her careful use of light constructs an inviting, warm atmosphere for her sitters and the viewer alike. Through her work she makes visible that which is difficult to convey in a photograph – love, care, and human connection.
Capture 2025 56 Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project Xaviera Simmons Freedom is Not Guaranteed, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist Site photo and installation mock-up: Robert Marks
57 PUBLIC ART East Hastings Billboard: Xaviera Simmons Freedom is Not Guaranteed, 2018 Curated by Nya Lewis, Artspeak March 21 – June 15 Sited on one billboard at the corner of E Hastings St and Hawks Ave, Vancouver Each age finds it necessary to reconsider at least some portions of the past, from points of view furnished by new conditions which reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the previous generation.1 – Frederick Jackson Turner In portrayal and critique, Freedom is Not Guaranteed home the elements of dynamic photography and storytelling, sowing seeds for public discord through lens-based imagery becoming sites for ontological investigation. Bold, hand-drawn lettering, crude yet composed, stamps the left of the image, superseding a blurred pointing figure of a Black woman standing in fields of knee-high yellow stalk beneath a blue-grey sky. The gesture of the point: to direct, delineate, reference, and an assertion against North America’s socio-political climate, past, present, and future, is further grounded by what may be read as a metaphorical positioning of frontier, 2 a paradoxical and philosophical construction of possibility, however fraught. Xaviera Simmons’s practice interrogates narratives using photography as a “revelatory reparative mechanism”3 to navigate the ways in which we continue to unsettle the landscape and our relationship to it. They are a historian, an agentic medium, across painting, sculpture, photography, and media works, forming a visual record of Black life, underpinning the cyclical imperative of artists to undo/create. In this, Simmons’s work challenges the notion of the witness with a more deeply situated task of implication, universalizing a warning, a whistle – uncertainty as far as the eye can see. Commissioned by the artist-led organization For Freedoms in 2018 as part of their 50 State Initiative, Freedom is Not Guaranteed has been exhibited in South Dakota, Brooklyn, NY, and Washington, DC, and to mark For Freedoms’ first Canadian collaboration, in Vancouver, BC’s Downtown Eastside. Each location further contemplates the vulnerability of humanity and the imposed veil of progress masking the loose threads of white supremacy, censored speech, misinformation, history suppression, reparations, Indigenous sovereignty, incarceration, housing, poverty, anti-Black racism, misogyny, trans rights, a continuum of systemic assurance, and the poetic questioning of progress. Freedom is Not Guaranteed by Xaviera Simmons is curated by Artspeak Gallery and commissioned by and presented in partnership with For Freedoms 1. Frederick Jackson Turner quoted in Margaret Washington, “African American History and the Frontier Thesis,” Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (1993): 230–41, www.doi. org/10.2307/3124089. 2. The use of “frontier” is in reference to the histories of Black settlement established communities. These settlements were often established by Black Loyalists, fugitive slaves, and Black soldiers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 3. “Xaviera Simmons: the witness as the reparator,” KADIST, interview, 2022, 15 min., 18 sec., posted on YouTube, www. youtube.com/watch?v=cQwIGs-EapM.
Capture 2025 58 Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project June Clark Untitled, c. 1983 Courtesy of the Artist and Daniel Faria Gallery Site photo: Dennis Ha Installation mock-up: Robert Marks
59 PUBLIC ART GreyChurch Billboard: June Clark Life’s Fugue Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival Sited on a billboard at Fraser St and E 15th Ave, Vancouver March 14, 2025 – March 9, 2026 Untitled, c. 1983 On view March 14 – July 21, 2025 Untitled, 1976 On view July 25 – November 24, 2025 Franno, 1982 On view November 28, 2025 – March 9, 2026 Working across photography, text, collage, sculpture, and installation since the late 1960s, June Clark has poetically woven her personal experience with the larger public concerns of our time. Her practice persistently investigates the ways in which history and memory, both individual and communal, unite to shape identity. The black-and-white images presented on the GreyChurch Billboard in rotation over the course of a year are three of many images Clark made in the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto, her adopted hometown, where she moved after she immigrated to Canada in 1968 from Harlem, New York. Documenting friends as well as those she encountered in the street, parks, barbershops, and diners, Clark’s carefully composed, lucid, and affecting images offer evidence of her witnessing of the world around her. A close-up of her friend Franno’s hands, an image of a bicycle messenger stopped and craning to peek through a hole in construction hoarding, and a depiction of the joy on the faces of those in a choir all represent the quotidian encounters and folks Clark made significant by photographing. In turning her lens on those who surround her, she makes visible and gives importance to her lived experience. The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill
Capture 2025 Caroline Monnet Creatura Dada (still), 2016 single-channel video with sound 3:00 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Blouin Division Part of the Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall, The Image Centre Public Art Project
Capture 2025 62 Valia Russo Ella Morton Lindsay McIntyre Ning Cheng David Gilbert Khim Mata Hipol Mary Sui Yee Wong Lauraine Mak Canada Line Public Art Project Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Project – InTransit BC Canada Line Public Art Stations Map For the 2025 multi-site Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lens-based artworks at Canada Line stations throughout Greater Vancouver. This year’s project stretches across eight locations, from Waterfront to Richmond-Brighouse Station, and includes contributions from Capture and other art organizations, including Booooooom, the Contemporary Art Gallery, CONTACT Photography Festival, and Richmond Art Gallery. N Vancouver Waterfront Vancouver City Centre Yaletown-Roundhouse Olympic Village King Edward Aberdeen Richmond-Brighouse Lansdowne Fraser River Richmond
63 PUBLIC ART Waterfront Station: Valia Russo Works from the Junkspace series, 2023–24 Valia Russo Junkspace 1, from the Junkspace series, 2023 Curated by Capture Photography Festival Courtesy of the Artist April 1 – August 31 In his photographic series Junkspace, Paris-based artist Valia Russo references the titular concept as proposed by architect and theorist Remment Lucas Koolhaas. Koolhaas coined the term “junkspace” to denote the generic, undifferentiated environments proliferating in our contemporary landscape that are shaped by globalization and rapid urbanization. Junkspace is marked by a heterogeneous aesthetic and an absence of coherence or unified style, resulting in both uniform and repetitive spaces. By exploring the complexities of our physical and virtual environments, Russo’s work presents photographs cluttered with disjointed signs, symbols, and images that shape our everyday experiences. This overwhelming stream of visual information subtly conditions our perceptions in insidious ways. Using automated tools and artificial intelligence to manipulate his images, the artist intentionally diminishes visual recognition, blurring the line between reality and simulation. He constructs dystopian assemblages that critique artificiality and excessive contemporary culture. Russo’s work provokes contemplation on the ways in which our environments are constructed and hybridized, while also reflecting the fluid and unstable nature of the image itself.
Capture 2025 64 Vancouver City Centre Station: Ella Morton Works from The Dissolving Landscape series, 2016– Ella Morton Pack Ice #1, from The Dissolving Landscape series, 2024 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival Curated by CONTACT Photography Festival April 1 – August 31 During the summer of 2024, Canadian artist Ella Morton found herself on a journey to what felt like the end of the earth, confronting the sublime and volatile region of the northern Arctic Ocean. Pack Ice #1 and Pack Ice #2 are images created as a result of a long-term project called The Dissolving Landscape that began in 2016 during The Arctic Circle residency in Svalbard, Norway. Situated as murals on the glass façade of the Canada Line’s Vancouver City Centre Station, the two seemingly abstract images of the vast ocean appear to shift and crack like the polar ice packs themselves. Morton’s pursuit of experimentation and chance in her practice contrasts with the slow and precise nature of photographing with her large-format camera. The artist soaks film in acidic solutions before exposure in order to degrade the emulsion. Then, when printing the images, she uses the mordançage technique – traditionally saved for black-and-white silver gelatin prints – lifting the emulsion off the paper and creating mysterious veils and textures. Morton’s seductive yet unsettling large-scale images are suggestive of an otherworldly portal to a remote and fragile ecosystem changing at an unnerving pace as the planet warms and sea levels rise as a result of the climate crisis.
65 PUBLIC ART Yaletown-Roundhouse Station: Lindsay McIntyre What We Never Lost, 2020/25 Linsday McIntyre Seeing Her (still), 2020 Courtesy of the Artist and the CAG Presented by the Contemporary Art Gallery Curated by the Contemporary Art Gallery in partnership with Capture April 4 – September 7 For over two decades, Lindsay McIntyre’s work across documentary, experimental film, and expanded cinema performance has originated from laboriously manipulating the properties of celluloid film. Recurring themes in her wide-ranging practice include her family history, displacement from Inuit Nunangat, place and land-based methodologies, Inuit community, and survivance. At the Canada Line’s Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, McIntyre presents a selection of double-exposed images that depict and simultaneously obscure the beaded front panel of her great-grandmother’s amauti. These hypnotic frames, drawn from her silent, hand-processed Super 16 colour reversal animation Seeing Her (2020), parallel the abundant skill, technique, and labour involved in the parka’s making with McIntyre’s hands-on analogue filmmaking. Offering an experience of the garment that resists total visibility, the film stills enact a refusal of the ethnographic documentary lens that often accompanies images of Inuit and Inuit culture.
Capture 2025 66 Olympic Village Station: Ning Cheng Works from the Soft Wall series, 2023 Ning Cheng Untitled, from the Soft Wall series, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with Booooooom Curated by Booooooom and Capture Photography Festival April 1 – August 31 London-based artist Ning Cheng’s series Soft Wall presents surreal, quirky, and poetic images that rely on mundane objects and spaces. She creates temporary sculptures by transforming everyday things, invoking a sense of play. From a foot insole on stair edges to stacked gloves in a sandy void, a house of cards on a street sewer, face masks floating in a sink, and a clump of lit candles, each image offers instability, a sense of peculiar movement and suspense that challenges our perception of balance and order found in unexpected spaces. These sculptural objects are informed by superstitions the artist had and the self-made rituals she would perform, as both stress release and source of comfort, subtly shaping how she would navigate her daily life. Through her lens, Cheng transforms private and public spaces into sites of imaginative intervention, inviting viewers to reconsider how our inner struggles and thoughts shape our daily lives.
67 PUBLIC ART King Edward Station: David Gilbert Window Treatments David Gilbert Hereafter, 2021–22 Courtesy of the Artist and Chris Sharp Gallery, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Curated by Capture Photography Festival and Rebecca Camacho Presents April 1 – August 31 David Gilbert’s practice embraces a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, assemblage, and installation, yet ultimately it culminates in photography. He repurposes scraps and found objects: fabric, yarn, paper, and cardboard to create transitory scenes in his studio. The ephemeral nature of his material choices leads to the creation of poetic, haunting images. In photographs devoid of people, Gilbert pays careful attention to natural lighting so that light and shadow become the significant characters. While intentional in their compositions, the works also rely on chance and improvisation as the artist captures the quickly changing sunlight beaming into his studio. This ever-changing and often fading light infuses the work with a meditative and melancholic air. While photography is often embraced for its supposed objective, documentary nature, Gilbert’s photographs celebrate the suggestive and the beautiful – deliberately leaving room for mystery and curiosity: he asks the viewer to allow for uncertainty and to participate in the process of interpretation.
Capture 2025 68 Aberdeen Station: Khim Mata Hipol Eroplanong Papel at Bangkang Papel, 2023 Khim Mata Hipol Eroplanong Papel (Paper Airplane), from the Eroplanong Papel at Bangkang Papel series, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist Text by Pari Presented by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery in partnership with Capture Curated by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery April 2025 – March 2026 Activating memories through movement, Khim Mata Hipol folds migrant rituals into Eroplanong Papel at Bangkang Papel (Paper Airplane and Paper Boat), evoking the childhood innocence of paper airplanes and boats. Each photogram is carefully folded and exposed to light for five seconds – a symbolic gesture reflecting the five-year journey toward obtaining Canadian citizenship. The resulting gradients of glow and shadow evoke abstract, shifting landscapes that develop into emotional terrains of migration and belonging. The symmetrical patterns echo qualities of a yantra, a geometric art form rooted in South Asian traditions and often used as a meditative aid to focus the mind. Predominantly composed of interlocking triangles radiating from a central point, a yantra inspires introspection through its visual structure. Similarly, this body of work creates a contemplative space where striking minimalism reflects the raw vulnerabilities of new beginnings. The immigrant metaphor is stripped bare and exposed to light, with bodies emerging from creases, continuously shaping and reshaping, navigating identities in flux. Each bend speaks to a movement, tracing migratory routes that embody cycles of grieving and rebuilding, remembering and reinventing, departing and arriving. Hipol’s work evokes this intimate journey and transforms it into a universal reflection on Asian diasporic resilience, inviting viewers to see migration not merely as a physical act but as a profound process in the redefinition and reclamation of selfhood. Ultimately, these photographs map nonlinear journeys that navigate between the pull of family, familiarity, and the pursuit of promised transformations.
69 PUBLIC ART Lansdowne Station: Mary Sui Yee Wong TREASURE II, 2025 Mary Sui Yee Wong TREASURE II, 2025 Courtesy of the Artist This public art project is featured in tandem with Restless by Nature: Mary Sui Yee Wong, 1990s to the Present, a major survey exhibition presented at Richmond Art Gallery from April 12 to June 8, 2025. Presented by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery in partnership with Capture Curated by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery April 2025 – March 2026 Mary Sui Yee Wong’s TREASURE (1999) was originally a public art commission that was part of Québec’s Art and Architecture Integration Policy. The public artwork currently sits in the foyer of a hospital in Montréal’s Chinatown. The hospital serves many Chinese seniors who are ambulatory or have limited mobility, seldom venturing outside or beyond the grounds. With the installation, Wong decided to bring the atmosphere of a natural setting into the sterile interior space, for patients to enjoy. It consists of a four-panel mural depicting the sky, bracketing a landscape drawing, while the Chinese character 宝 (meaning “treasure”) rendered in glass sits in a shallow basin of water below. TREASURE II (2025) is a new iteration of the original work, featuring two photographs of a vivid blue sky with billowing clouds, which frame a black-and-white detail from the classical Chinese landscape painting Buddhist Temples amid Autumn Mountains by an unidentified artist (circa fourteenth and fifteenth century). In this version, Wong has inserted into the painting the Chinese character 宝 so that it floats above a misty, mountainous backdrop. TREASURE II seeks to honour two important pillars of Chinese culture: the paintings of times past and the precious elders of the present day. As the popular saying goes, 家有一老，如有一宝. This translates as “Having an elder in the family is like having a treasure.” Given the significant Chinese diaspora community in Richmond, Lansdowne Station is an especially fitting location. The work invites viewers of all backgrounds to ponder the relationship between history and contemporaneity, culture and nature, past and present, young and old.
Capture 2025 70 Richmond-Brighouse Station: Lauraine Mak Works from the Levels series, 2024 Lauraine Mak Sequence 1, from the Levels series, 2024 Courtesy of the Artist Presented by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery in partnership with Capture Curated by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery April 2025 – March 2026 Levels is an ongoing series of works centring around the concept of measurement as a means of justifying and understanding phenomena. As part of this series, Sequence 1–5 is composed of five photographs which capture an uncertain moment in time, grounded by a tiny bubble of air at the centre of a level tool. The instrument negotiates a version of truth with the observer which is contingent on gravity, orientation, and precise reading to render an indisputable analytical truth. The artist asks if objective positionality is unquestionable and if instruments of measurement are infallible. The inconspicuous bubble in the level is a powerful device that symbolizes the logical order imposed on daily life and motion: a reminder that all things follow earthly physics in one way or another. In contrast to the endless feed of mass-produced images, these works encourage a moment to slow down the fleeting consumptive gaze, creating meaning outside the measurable scales of quality and quantity. In images that possess no clear indication of where they were taken, Sequence 1–5 invokes in the viewer a collapse of objective awareness of their surroundings at any given moment, suspending them instead within the logic and gravity of the photographs.
71 PUBLIC ART Valia Russo Junkspace 2, from the Junkspace series, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist
Capture 2025 72 Gohar Dashti and Hamed Noori Near and Far, 2020– Courtesy of the Artists Evergreen Cultural Centre Public Art Project
73 PUBLIC ART Evergreen Cultural Centre Public Art Project: Gohar Dashti and Hamed Noori Near and Far, 2020– Curated by Katherine Dennis, Art Gallery at Evergreen | Evergreen Cultural Centre March 2025 – February 2026 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam Near and Far (2020–) is a series of photo collages by artists Gohar Dashti and Hamed Noori. Using geometric patterns common in Islamic art and architecture as inspiration, Dashti and Noori create collaged images from original photographs of both Iranian and North American landscapes. Western art has traditionally depicted nature as a landscape, wherein the horizon line is critical. With the advent of photography, time also became a critical element, allowing for the capture of a place at a single moment from a single human perspective. The traditions of the Persian miniature, in contrast, use a flattened perspective devoid of shadows or horizon lines, instead allowing audiences to access all angles, places, and time in a single viewpoint. This tradition is less about describing an individual’s momentary perspective on their environment than it is about expressing eternity. The series Near and Far adapts Western traditions of nature photography and applies a Persian approach to perspective and geometry. The resulting intricate artworks combine the two philosophies to create a visual, cross-cultural dialogue. Near and Far offers fantastical and poetic interpretations of what a landscape can be. The artists have reconfigured one work from this series specifically for Evergreen Cultural Centre’s architecture. The expansive twelve-point star depicts the sky from different sides of the world while echoing the surrounding sky and water of Town Centre Park. Spanning the façade of the Centre’s lake-facing lobby, this impressive installation blurs the divide between inside and outside spaces, enveloping viewers in the magic and mystery of the sky above.
Capture 2025 Edward Burtynsky Coast Mountains #13, Near Mount Waddington, British Columbia, Canada, 2023 pigment inkjet print 148.6 × 198.1 cm Courtesy of the Artist © Edward Burtynsky, Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary, and Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto Part of the Featured Exhibitions Program
FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art The Coast Mountains: Recent Works by Edward Burtynsky Audain Art Museum Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion The Polygon Gallery Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar Vancouver Art Gallery Lindsay McIntyre: Distance Between Objects, Time Between Events Contemporary Art Gallery Emmy Lee Wall and Chelsea Yuill Dr. Curtis Collins Dr. Mark Sealy Anthony Kiendl 74–87 88–91 96–101 102–105 92–95
Capture 2025 76 Simranpreet Kaur Anand A true story of direct action, 2024 woven photo-printed canvas 104.7 x 95.8 cm Courtesy of the Artist Production assistance: Conner Singh VanderBeek This artwork is a combination of photographs from the following sources: Photographer unknown Clearbrook, BC, July 17, 1979 Courtesy of the Canadian Farmworkers Union Collection, a digital initiative of Simon Fraser University Library Photograph by Sunny Arora Naujawan Support Network protest at Brampton Gateway Terminal, ON, June 24, 2024
77 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS This exhibition is co-presented by the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art and Capture Photography Festival. It is sponsored by Parc Retirement Living and is generously supported by the Audain Foundation, the Timothy A. Young Family Foundation, the City of North Vancouver, the District of North Vancouver through the Arts and Culture Grants Program of the North Vancouver Recreation and Culture Commission, Artists for Kids, the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation, and the North Vancouver School District capturephotofest.com Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art April 3 – June 21 Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices is co-curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Capture Photography Festival, and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator, Capture Photography Festival Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices Simranpreet Kaur Anand Barbara Astman Maya Beaudry Dana Claxton Liz Ikiriko Jayce Salloum Michaëlle Sergile Michelle Sound Lan “Florence” Yee Text by Chelsea Yuill Photography and textiles are ubiquitous; we continuously add to our personal diary of photographs on our smart phones and are wrapped in and clothed by fabric. Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices explores the intrinsic relationship between these two mediums. Textiles have traditionally been dismissed and undervalued because of the gendered norms embedded within these historically domestic practices, including sewing, beading, embroidery, knitting, lacemaking, weaving, and dyeing. Photography, with its many uses for
Capture 2025 78 personal snapshots, evidence, surveillance, advertising, storytelling, and art, is a relatively new medium historically dominated by male practitioners. Although obvious distinctions exist, there are many threads of connection between the materials and processes used in both mediums: the natural and synthetic fibres that compose paper and thread, and the chemical process of creating a photograph or dyeing fabric. The artists in Stitched proudly collapse the divisions and hierarchies shrouding these two mediums to reclaim, integrate, and assert new critical approaches to lens-based and textile art forms. Including emerging and established artists, the artworks in this exhibition explore ritual, memory, aesthetic inheritance, immigration, technology, and colonial and embodied archives. In a cultural landscape that continues to become more and more digitized, and a political landscape that becomes ever more cruel, their work asks what it means to create images that evoke the desire to touch and feel. If a photograph is a memory captured and a textile is a memory lived in, Simranpreet Kaur Anand’s interdisciplinary practice draws from familial and communal histories, often from the Punjabi diaspora living in Canada and the United States as a result of colonialism. The installation Wake of Departure encompasses hand-embroidered protest photographs, a rug, and woven images depicting intergenerational experiences of Punjabi newcomers and students in collective protest highlighting the fight required to turn their dreams of migration into reality and add to the social fabric of Canada. Anand plays with the surface of the photograph by deconstructing the pixel grid and re-weaves it physically with photo paper, layering various materials like vinyl, print poster, and woven textiles to create a large-scale collage. In the video work ਮੁਕਤਿ ਮਾਲ ਕਨਿਕ ਲਾਲ ਹੀਰਾ ਮਨ ਰੰਜਨ ਕੀ ਮਾਇਆ ॥ mukti maal kanik laal heera man ranjan kee maaiaa ॥ (2021) the artist and her collaborator Conner Singh VanderBeek stack and fold fabrics to reenact the Sikh practice of donating sets of rumala sahib to gurdwaras, Sikh places of worship. This tradition occurs on special occasions like births, deaths, and weddings, when the textiles are placed upon the Guru Granth Sahib. These textiles have historically been made by hand with natural fibres, but with the force of global industrial production, are often constructed with plastic-laden fabrics. By illuminating the richness in colour, pattern, and texture, the sound and sight of hands caressing each piece of mass-produced sacred textile creates a haptic visual reminiscent of the real. This intersection between textile-making history and contemporary technology also appears as we scroll, click, and tap through the internet and social media platforms. Words like “threads” nod to the presence of materiality and its relationship – intentional or not – to its origins in the industrial production of textiles. The most evident example of this is the Jacquard loom, a device considered to be an influential leap in the history of computing. Invented in 1804 by the French engineer Joseph-Marie Jacquard, this machine simplifies the creation of complex designs by using thousands of punch card holes that correspond to the rows of a textile pattern.1 By the 1840s, English mathematician Ada Lovelace, with English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage, hypothesized, “If it was possible to program a loom to weave any design, then it must be possible to program a machine to perform any computation.”2 Lovelace championed what would now be described as the software, the programs that would run on the analytical engine they were developing, while Babbage worked on the hardware. This history of mathematics and computer science shows how textiles and technology are inextricably linked. Textiles are
79 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS technology, and this connection parallels the chemicals, mechanics, hardware, and software required to produce and circulate photographs today. Montreal-based artist Michaëlle Sergile revives the technology of the Jacquard loom by adding to its history of cultural production as a Black woman. As an emerging artist with French roots as a result of colonialism, Sergile creates evocative weavings that retrace her lineage through family photographs, specifically of her parents’ generation in Haiti. A repository of memory, the translation from photograph to textile portrait complicates the singular notion that the photograph is evidence and truth. The time and labour required to rebuild the image, thread by thread in each blackand-white woven portrait, is a testament to how working with textiles is a meditative practice that connects the maker to explore their inner landscape. The opaque black of Sergile’s work speaks to the abyss, not solely from a sense of loss but, in the artist’s words “to represent the vastness of stories and the numerous layers of memories.”3 The woven structure is an accumulation of intersecting stories and memories that compose a person and the histories they carry. Jayce Salloum’s photo-sculptures parallel the accumulation of photos and textiles that reveal our personal and collective stories. We are constantly being fed images through our devices and on public advertising platforms. Salloum disrupts this force of image consumption by tearing and stacking his personal photographs into forms where only glimpses of his storyline can be viewed at the edges. The matter-of-fact tearing that reduces the size of and multiplies each image means the singular photograph becomes many, taking on a completely different form outside the frame. Meticulous, meditative, and time-consuming, these artworks are collaborative as they are fabricated by a handful of studio assistants in the intimacy of their homes resulting in distinct photo sculptures that subtly reveal the character and style of each maker. Linking both the fibres that make up paper used for photographs and fabric used for quilting, Salloum saves the offcuts of his digitally printed photos to then be torn individually into squares at sizes ranging from a quarter inch to seven inches. Each of these squares is pierced in the centre with a needle and threaded onto a fishing line, creating a long strand of undulating diamond shapes that hang from the ceiling and, at times, spiral onto the floor. Shoot, stitch, crop, cut, develop, dye, iron, scan. By using tools, techniques, and materials that span histories and civilizations, each artist in this exhibition approaches the mediums of photography and textile with tentacular thinking. Donna Haraway describes the tentacular in her essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” (2016) as the messy and complex links between human and non-human life forms.4 Within this interconnected messiness, Haraway uses the metaphor of compost to advocate for how this fertile soil allows new relations and opportunities to grow. If “tentacularity is about life lived along lines – and such a wealth of lines – not at points, not in spheres,” but as “nets and networks,” then perhaps this can translate to the ways in which, when the grid is disrupted, photography and textiles become metaphors for lineage, knowledge transfer, and circulation.5 There has indeed been no separation between photography and textile practices in Barbara Astman’s lifelong commitment to radicalize visual culture since the early 1970s. In her Woven Stories (2023) tapestries, she uses a plastic emulsion material to transfer images from newsprint, primarily of advertisements featuring women, onto fabric. These images become the building blocks for the woven tapestries and disrupt the fast-readability of slick editorial photography. She then uses a digital weaving method to intuitively
Capture 2025 80 collage the source material, ensuring that colour, figuration, and abstraction are balanced. By combining production techniques that are manual and machinebased, Astman draws our attention to the grid found in the digital pixel of the photograph and the warp and the weft of a tapestry. In transferring, collaging, fading, and blending, each tapestry offers new depths to see and query the images that structure our cultural fabric. Pushing tentacular thinking further is Maya Beaudry’s work that explores metamorphosis. Beginning with photography, she documents the continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of her hometown, Vancouver, and transfers these photos onto fabric. The material surface of the printed image becomes distorted: stuffed, sewn, cut away, painted upon, and wrapped around a wooden structure. The visual language in Beaudry’s artworks speaks to memory and place: how our personal, spiritual, and collective relationships to the built environment, to the interior and exterior realms, shift and evolve with time as a result of systemic forces. These elements are exemplified in Beaudry’s commissioned site-specific work titled Gateway (2025) that spans the width of the gallery from wall to wall. This structure is made of wooden two-by-fours and is wrapped with an enlarged fabric photograph of a demolished residential building in Vancouver. As one walks the length of the structure, the entire single image reveals itself, mimicking a holograph and the building blocks of a physical home. Embellished with angels in aura-like watercolours, this dimension of the work calls on inhabitants of the spirit realm as guardians, beacons of hope amid grief. This additive approach to the photograph contrasts the single and literal interpretation often associated with photography, to instead contemplate how the past bleeds into the present. Lan “Florence” Yee follows this same thread of adding to the photo’s surface that depicts a cityscape in PROOF–Community is easy to romanticize (2022) and PROOF–Anti-Displacement Chinatown Garden (2020). These photo sculptures of nondescript public and semi-private spaces are printed on a sheer cotton voile with the artist’s hand-embroidered watermark “Proof ” repeated diagonally across the fabric. The two works are part of a larger series which reflects upon the complex desire for archival presence while acknowledging the archive’s harmful history of exclusion and ethnographic classification. Yee ruptures the expectation of legibility and clarity of the high-quality photograph by printing on transparent fabric. The presentation structure – pipes joined to the wall – is an alternative to the traditional frame. As viewers, we see through the photograph. Delicate, translucent, impersonal, Yee’s haunting photographic textile sculpture asks: “how do we hold space for the unrecorded, the unrecordable, and the yetto-be-recorded?”6 Photography in its traditional sense is rigid and immediate. The mechanics of the camera, the precise right angles of the photo paper and frame combined with the fast results of the image, whether digital or film, contrast with the soft and slow pace of working with textiles. As we can see across the artworks in this exhibition, when these art forms come together, this rhythm of time and pace are in dialogue. Memories, milestones, sorrow, and redemption can be held in the photograph and textile object. Photographs and textiles are a form of gift-giving, an offering to memorialize care and connections, or to inspire hope. Headdress (2018–23) is a series by Dana Claxton that exemplifies these qualities by using portrait photography to celebrate Indigenous cultural abundance. The series includes five fireboxes (commonly known as lightboxes),
81 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS two of which are on display in the exhibition. Each portrait honours her sitter and features their personal collections. In Jeneen (2018), the sitter’s collection “spans three generations from Old Crow, Yukon, with designs that are specific to the Vuntut Gwich’in First Nation,” and in Connie (2019), a matriarch of beadwork “adorns her own hand beaded pieces.”7 More than decorative objects, each piece of beadwork holds cultural and historical significance to the wearers and the makers. The women who are adorned with these pieces are the cultural carriers of what bell hooks describes as the “aesthetic inheritance” into the future.8 Adjacent to Claxton’s fireboxes in the exhibition are Liz Ikiriko’s organza and satin banners of photographs she took in Canada and Nigeria. These three works function as a rite of passage, tracing ceremony, migration routes, and ways that archives are not just material but embodied experiences. A lush, green landscape is pictured in Descent (2022), with its bottom edge embellished using a decorative gold fringe. By appropriating the elements of a national flag in adornment, size, and orientation, Ikiriko articulates a yearning to return and a yearning for a sense of “home” in different geographies. The languages of photography, textiles, and the archive intersect to map the complexity of the African diaspora, a search for belonging while honouring cultural diffusion. Through these works, Ikiriko poignantly asks: “how do we reconcile displacement with a sense of rootedness in adopted homelands?”9 Seeking rootedness on homelands while experiencing ongoing colonial displacement are visually articulated in Michelle Sound’s collages Michel Band (2024) and Mother Land (2024) that combine photographs from family albums and colonial archives. As a Cree and Métis multidisciplinary artist, Sound creates cuts in these images that speak to how the tools of the map, legal document, and camera have been instrumentalized in the colonial power structures that have shaped and continue to shape her life and the lives of her relatives and, as seen in the portrait photograph of a landscape, their flora, fauna, and animal kin. Resembling the closing of a wound as an act of healing, the stitching on the surface of these black-and-white photographs with colourful beading, pompoms, and threads speaks to the resilience, hope, and care of Indigenous ways of knowing, memory, and cultural survival. Whether behind the camera or the loom, the act of creating an image is an embodied experience. It takes shape from within the artist’s internal landscape, often inspired by observations and life events, materializing with the use of technology into an entity to share with others to contemplate and experience. In Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices, each artist integrates technology with the human experience of creating. By disrupting limitations long imposed upon these mediums, the unexpected methods and hybridity of approaches chart new territories of what is possible in today’s overwhelmingly saturated image culture. 1. “Jacquard Machine,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, February 25, 2002, www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jacquard_machine. 2. Sadie Plant, “Ada Lovelace and the Loom of Life,” Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, (Harper Collins, 1997), 255–64. 3. “Michaëlle Sergile,” Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, September 22, 2024, www.huguescharbonneau.com/en/ artistes/michaelle-sergile/. 4. Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” e-flux Journal 75 (September 2016), www.e-flux. com/journal/75/67125/tentacularthinking-anthropocene-capitalocenechthulucene/. 5. Ibid. 6. “How to Give Ghosts a Sunburn,” Lan “Florence” Yee, December 27, 2024, www.lanflorenceyee.com/proof. 7. “Headdress,” Dana Claxton, December 27, 2024, www.danaclaxton.com/ artwork/headdress. 8. bell hooks, “Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand,” in Belonging: A Culture of Place (Routledge, 1990), 115–22. 9. “Flags of Unsung Countries (AGSM),” Liz Ikiriko, January 7, 2025, www. lizikiriko.com/flags_agsm.
Capture 2025 82 Barbara Astman Woven Stories #34, from Woven Stories series, 2023 woven cotton, nylon thread 119.4 x 134.6 cm © Barbara Astman and Corkin Gallery, Toronto Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
83 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Maya Beaudry Trellis, 2024 digital pigment print on cotton, acrylic ink 135.9 x 78.7 x 5.1 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Towards Gallery
Capture 2025 84 Dana Claxton Headdress – Connie, from the Headdress series, 2018 LED firebox with trans mounted chromogenic transparency 152.4 x 101.6 x 20.3 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
85 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Liz Ikiriko Facing the Precipitous, 2016 black-and-white print on organza 76.2 x 91.4 cm Courtesy of the Artist
Capture 2025 86 Jayce Salloum nest, 2016 torn photographs 213.3 x 17.7 cm Courtesy of the Artist, Mónica Reyes Gallery, and MKG127 Gallery
87 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Michaëlle Sergile Ombre Portrait (Zanni), from the Ombre Portrait series, 2024 cotton, two-shuttle Jacquard loom 264.1 x 121.9 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau
Capture 2025 88 Michelle Sound Mother Land (detail), 2024 embroidery thread, mink pom poms, ribbon, and glass seed beads 91.4 x 121.9 x 5 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Ceremonial Art
89 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Lan “Florence” Yee PROOF–Community is easy to romanticize (detail), from the How to Give Ghosts a Sunburn series, 2022 hand-embroidery on cotton 93.9 x 127 cm Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Darren Rigo
Capture 2025 90 Edward Burtynsky Coast Mountains #15, Receding of Glacier, British Columbia, Canada, 2023 pigment inkjet print 148.6 x 198.1 cm Courtesy of the Artist © Edward Burtynsky, Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary, and Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto
91 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS audainartmuseum.com Audain Art Museum April 28 – September 15 Curated by Dr. Curtis Collins, Director and Chief Curator, Audain Art Museum Glaciers hold great transformative power. Over millions of years, they have advanced and retreated, carving valleys, sculpting mountain peaks, creating moraines, and moving huge amounts of sediment. They have also played a transformative role in our spiritual landscape across cultures, as sites for personal and spiritual rebirth. Today, as these ice forms recede and our global temperature rises, they bring a message to us: to face our dramatic impact on our natural world, and to stop heating our planet by transforming ourselves. The Coast Mountains: Recent Works by Edward Burtynsky Text by Severn Cullis-Suzuki
Capture 2025 92 The photographs in The Coast Mountains: Recent Works by Edward Burtynsky at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, British Columbia, depict glaciers in their raw power and tell a story of ice and land metamorphosis. The photographs themselves are important: glacier photography has long been significant for documenting change – over time, we have been able to compare icescapes and determine rates of melt. In times of artificial intelligence and climate change denial, definitive records of changing landscapes and ecosystems are essential. We must continue to document the truth, especially in “post-truth” times. Further, these photos tell a story largely invisible to modern, urban humans. Eighty per cent of Canadians now live in cities – a trend followed around the planet. In pursuit of the globalized economic promise, we have lost our intimacy with the land and forget that we need it to survive. Edward Burtynsky often reveals the truths of man-made landscapes ordinarily invisible to our eyes, but this exhibition tells truths of natural landscapes usually unseen, as we are immersed daily in an urban, digital mindscape. The legacy of massive ice on the landscape around the glaciers is clear. Though our natural landscapes are all a result of geological forces and time, in our urbanized mindset, we are rarely aware that these forces are always under way. Coast Mountains #15, Receding Glacier, British Columbia, Canada (2023) baldly shows the impact of frozen water on rock and earth. But glaciers have played a transformative role not only in changing and creating landscapes but in life itself. Glaciers are in fact life-givers: they are a source of the lifeblood of the land – our rivers and streams. Around the Earth, 1.5 billion people depend on the water from glacier-fed basins. Glaciers are crucial for water supply in the hottest and driest times, sustaining late summer water flow. Glacial melt moderates stream temperatures. These elements are critical for salmon and other fish populations and spawning habitats. These fish in turn sustain other ecosystems and populations far downstream and into the oceans. The glaciation conditions since the last ice age have provided an incredibly rich set of conditions for life on Earth, one in which we humans have flourished. It is not surprising that from the beginning of our time, mountains and glaciers have been sacred, transformative places for humans. They have been important places of connection to the heavens, our gods, the Earth, and ourselves. We humans have built trails, temples, tea huts, and ski resorts so we can be at the top of the world. We feel cleansed when we return to our regular material worlds after a time on snow and ice at a summit. Glaciers hold a special role in biocultural identity, offering another environmental landscape for us to have a special connection to place, and forming part of the mental landscape that makes us who we are. Today, the mountains are changing. Coast Mountains #13, Near Mount Waddington, British Columbia, Canada (2023) reveals a glacier in its massive, frozen glory, but change is clear. Glaciers recede at an unprecedented pace because of global heating caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. As they melt, glaciers are revealing natural cultural archives, showing us our ancestors’ relationships with them. Recently, at the Assembly of First Nations’ Third National Climate Gathering, I listened to Kluane Elder Mary Jane Johnson talk about recent findings at the Kluane Glacier in Yukon – copper points, a hearth, gopher bones. Beneath those, they found a steppe bison. And eighteen inches below that was a birchbark baby basket with the exact same stitching as her grandmother’s sewing on her own baby basket. The receding ice is revealing who we are, providing a direct connection to a continuum of being, to who we used to be. As I look at Burtynsky’s photos shot in Garibaldi Provincial Park, I myself remember who I am, and who I used to be. As I recognize the iconic Black Tusk in Coast Mountains #3, The Black Tusk, British Columbia, Canada (2023), my soul recalls itself, a generation ago, when I hiked Garibaldi with my best friend. We were new adults; the world was ours. We had just cycled across Canada: there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. Our future was exciting, but also uncertain. Our bike trip had aimed to raise awareness about
93 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS climate change; we’d grown up with asthma on the rise, and democratic power was clearly beginning to ebb as corporate influence and power grew. We were still optimistic, but also angry about the impacts of the dominant mentality of our species on the ecosystems we loved. And so we went to the mountains for clarity, solace, and inspiration. We went to The Black Tusk and its attendant glaciers. It was late summer, and the hike was exhilarating and beautiful. The mountains smiled on us, and we felt safe in the sun and good weather. We could still act like kids, dancing on the snow with our heavy packs, and laughing our way uphill. The Black Tusk was a worthy altar to make for our pilgrimage. The glaciers were comforting, like grandparents who cradled us. When we descended, we felt transformed, ready to be hopeful anew, joyfully reminded of how small we were. Today, the glaciers are invoking their transformational power in a dramatic way. Here in Southern BC, they are disappearing quickly. As glacier and climate researcher Dr. Gwenn Flowers says, “Glaciers are barometers for climate change, averaging the weather over years to decades. They have no political agenda, they don’t lie, so when we see them retreat up the mountain sides, that means the climate is warming.”1 There’s no debating a glacier. By the end of the century, seventy per cent of Western Canada’s glaciers will be gone, and some parts of Southern BC will be completely deglaciated. Burtynsky’s documentation of these, changing faster than ever before, puts us face to face with the transformation of the natural world that is under way. This exhibition bids us to pay homage to these great bodies of ice and to pay attention. Let us recognize what they are telling us: today’s stark truth that we are changing the natural world, our web of life that we all depend on. Let us remember who we are and who we have been, and that we can find spiritual awakening in the mountains, as our ancestors have. Let us awaken to the message of transformation these glaciers are telling us. And let us, in turn, bring about a great transformation in ourselves, us small humans, to stop the practices that are warming our world. Today, we have all the answers. All we need is to recommit to bringing back the sacred balance of life. 1. Dr. Gwenn Flowers interviewed in Finding Solitude, directed by Jaiden George and Tristan Hinder (Finding Solitude Film, 2020), www. findingsolitudefilm.com.
Capture 2025 94 Lindsay McIntyre Tuktuit (still), 2024– 16mm film approx. 10 mins. Courtesy of the Artist
95 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS cagvancouver.org Contemporary Art Gallery April 4 – September 7 Lindsay McIntyre: Distance Between Objects, Time Between Events Text by Godfre Leung Lindsay McIntyre conducts her filmmaking as a material practice, often shooting on film stock made with handmade emulsions and subsequently processing her film by hand. In its laboriousness, her filmic enterprise stresses responsiveness as its foundation. Her manipulation of celluloid’s material properties disposes the image’s grain, surface texture, tonal range, and structure to the impacts of physical and environmental factors such as temperature and humidity. Rather than trying to solve or eliminate variables or “flaws” in the filmmaking process, McIntyre generates new visual possibilities from them, as the landscape shots in her films index the land itself as a catalyzing agent.
Capture 2025 96 At the Contemporary Art Gallery, McIntyre presents her solo exhibition Distance Between Objects, Time Between Events. Its central work, Tuktuit (Caribou), is an experimental film about the interconnections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Large passages of the film, which includes footage shot on film stock made with caribou gelatin emulsion, document McIntyre’s processing of a caribou hide to a rawhide state. Presented at CAG as an installation, the film is projected onto the hide itself, hung in shallow relief of a cinematic screen. In the gallery, the holes inadvertently made by McIntyre while scraping flesh and fat from the hide – her “mistakes” – become apertures through which cinematic light passes, landing in fragments on the screen that the hide partially eclipses. McIntyre uses the same word “process” to describe both her material work developing and fixing film and her preparation of the hide. She narrates in one of the film’s subtitles, referring to her great-grandmother Kumaa’naaq, a familiar subject of her award-winning works over almost two decades: “She could skin a caribou before it hit the ground. I cannot.” Reflecting on the distance between her great-grandmother’s expertly prepared hides and her own hole-riddled one, these sentences point to practical Inuit ancestral knowledge that was not passed down. They also allude to larger systems of colonialism echoed in the unspoken backstory of Kumaa’naaq’s permanent displacement from Inuit Nunangat in 1938, what she endured, and the pressures that faced her in her new life in Edmonton, resulting in McIntyre’s cultural loss in the present. At the same time, McIntyre’s expert and resourceful processing of film complements her underskilled processing of the hide, the artist honouring the memory of Kumaa’naaq’s handiwork with her own. In a carousel-like succession of mostly still shots, McIntyre depicts the land in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake, Nunavut), moving from close-ups of lichen to picturesque long shots of the landscape. Ultimately, these images chart the intersection between human activity and changes to the climate and natural environment: an oil drum piercing the horizon next to a discarded Gatorade bottle, and, midway through the film, former caribou grazing sites in states of decay in the wake of devastating Arctic wildfires. Tuktuit reveals a network of interconnections: the reliance of caribou on slow-growing lichen, its primary source of food, and in turn the importance of caribou to Inuit sustenance and ways of life. Unravelling from this are the downstream climate effects of human activity, which register especially acutely in the North. Wildfires, warming, and rapid freeze/thaw/freeze events in the Arctic all impede caribou’s access to lichen, leading to devastating declines in herd populations. In addition to depicting these interconnections, Tuktuit also dwells within them. McIntyre’s caribou gelatin film stock is susceptive to the same environmental variables that the film is about. The caribou’s diet and the impacts on it by Arctic warming affect the chemical makeup of the emulsion, subsequently generating the image’s unique contrast, intensity, and clarity. McIntyre describes her work as a collaboration with her materials. What we see in her films and how we see it result from her studied manipulation of material variables that depart greatly from the consistency – and transparency – of industrially manufactured film. Introducing the stakes of her enterprise, McIntyre relays the story of a batch of photographic plates in 1882 that didn’t properly register images, resulting in the near ruin of the Eastman Dry Plate Company (the precursor to Kodak). When it was discovered decades later that the defect was due to a lack of mustard greens in the diet of cows – a deficit of sulphur in the gelatin sourced from those cows to produce the plates’ photographic emulsion – Kodak developed a rigorously controlled livestock enterprise to perfect the standardization of its film manufacturing process. In contrast to Kodak’s reliably fast and “clean”
97 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS film emulsions, McIntyre’s film stock is not a means to a predetermined end. It responds. In a sense, it functions similarly to lichen itself, which as a bioindicator organism is often used by scientists to monitor impending ecological shifts. Analogue film is a responsive medium: the latent image registers when silver halide crystals suspended in emulsion react to light. Influencing visual variables she cannot totally control, McIntyre manifests the registering of images not as a given but as a process. She builds her films’ aesthetics from the idiosyncrasies that result from their unstable, analogue, handmade medium – that is, from not shooting on readymade, industrial film stock and not having it processed at a commercial film lab. When shooting, McIntyre notes, there is always the possibility that nothing happens; with her handmade emulsions, or amid the climate variables of the Arctic, sometimes the image doesn’t register enough, or at all. By analogy, this is what is at stake in Tuktuit’s ecological subject: in the aftermath of Arctic wildfires, it can take lichen decades – some estimate fifty to one hundred years – to regenerate, and studies show that burned ranges need over sixty years to become attractive again to caribou for grazing. Ecology is a process and has its own temporality. It is ultimately beyond our control, though our actions can influence it. More than half a century into the future, when the presently burned grazing sites have grown back, will there still be caribou to return to them?
Capture 2025 98 Rotimi Fani-Kayode Dan Mask, 1989 gelatin silver print 76.2 x 76.2 cm Courtesy of Autograph, London
99 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS The exhibition Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is organized by Autograph, London, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus thepolygon.ca The Polygon Gallery February 28 – May 25 Curated by Dr. Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph 1991– Professor of Photography Rights and Representation University of the Arts London Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for. Such a position gives me a feeling of having very little to lose. – Rotimi Fani-Kayode Beginning in the early 1980s, Rotimi Fani-Kayode developed a photographic practice that refused categorization, cutting across cultural codes, gender norms, and artistic traditions. Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to London in the 1960s, seeking political refuge during the civil war. As an art student in the United States, he came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes, balancing his family heritage and immigration status alongside his own queer sexuality and exposure to underground subcultures.
Capture 2025 100 Channelling these multiple facets of his identity into photography, FaniKayode generated a remarkable body of images over the course of a career cut tragically short by his death in 1989. Organized in partnership with Autograph (London) and the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode’s work and archives. This major exhibition brings together key series of colour and black-and-white photographs along with archival prints and never-before-exhibited works from Fani-Kayode’s student years. Often created in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst (1951–92), FaniKayode’s photographs treat romantic love with spiritual reverence, translating the emotional intensity of same-sex, multiracial desire into richly evocative symbolic language. Today, his art remains a potent source of inspiration, presciently anticipating contemporary photographic approaches to identity, sexuality, and race. Traces of Ecstasy Text by Rotimi Fani-Kayode It has been my destiny to end up as an artist with a sexual taste for other young men. As a result of this, a certain distance has necessarily developed between myself and my origins. The distance is even greater as a result of my having left Africa as a refugee over twenty years ago. On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for. Such a position gives me a feeling of having very little to lose. It produces a sense of personal freedom from the hegemony of convention. For one who has managed to hang on to his own creativity through the crises of adolescence and in spite of pressures to conform, it has a liberating effect. It opens up areas of creative enquiry which might otherwise have remained forbidden. At the same time, traces of the former values remain, making it possible to take new readings on to them from an unusual vantage point. The results are bound to be disorientating. In African traditional art, the mask does not represent a material reality; rather, the artist strives to approach a spiritual reality in it through images suggested by human and animal forms. I think photography can aspire to the same imaginative interpretations of life. My reality is not the same as that which is often presented to us in Western photographs. As an African working in a Western medium, I try to bring out the spiritual dimension in my pictures so that concepts of reality become ambiguous and are opened to reinterpretation. This requires what Yoruba priests and artists call a “technique of ecstasy.” Both aesthetically and ethically, I seek to translate my rage and my desire into new images which will undermine conventional perceptions and which may reveal hidden worlds. Many of the images are seen as sexually explicit – or more precisely, homosexually explicit. I make my pictures homosexual on purpose. Black men from the Third World have not previously revealed either to their own peoples or to the West a certain shocking fact: they can desire each other. Some Western photographers have shown that they can desire Black