Kara Uzelman

Join CAG Curator Kimberly Phillips in conversation with exhibiting artists as they discuss their work through the ideas that propel *The Blue Hour*.

 Joi T. Arcand, Colin Miner, Grace Ndiritu and Kara Uzelman with Kimberly Phillips: On Time and the Futurity of Photography

Talk

Writing in 1857, only a few short decades after the “invention” of photography, the art historian and critic Elizabeth Eastlake describes the photographic image as one that approaches us from the future and arrives in the present. While referring to the new technologies in chemical photography at the time, Eastlake’s comment might also be interpreted more portentously, as critical theorist Kaja Silverman suggests in *The Miracle of Analogy: The History of Photography, Part I*, as an invitation to upend canonical readings of photographs, which emphasize their simultaneous demonstration of “this-has-been” and “this-is-no-more.” The presumption that what we see when we look at a photograph is unalterable, Silverman suggests, “contributes to the political despair that afflicts so many of us today: our sense that the future is ‘all used up.’” Instead, she posits, we should consider photography as “the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us – of demonstrating that it exists, and that it will forever exceed us.” Here, the photograph becomes a tool with speculative potential, rather than one with simply the power to memorialize.

*The Blue Hour* extends from this premise to rethink our assumptions about the photograph’s relationship to time. Making reference to the brief period of twilight at dawn and dusk when temporal linearity appears to momentarily hover in a state of suspension, the exhibition presents works by five Canadian and international artists – Joi T. Arcand, Kapwani Kiwanga, Colin Miner, Grace Ndiritu, and Kara Uzelman–that collectively act as a proposition to consider the futurity of the photographic image. We might understand this “blue hour” as analogous to the photographic event, whether political, geological, cosmological or philosophical, which as literary theorist Eduardo Cadava has claimed, “interrupts the present; […] occurs between the present and itself, between the movement of time and itself.”

Joi T. Arcand is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in central Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory. Her practice is concerned with the invisibility of Indigeneity in contemporary Canadian culture and, in particular, how erasures of Indigenous presence, culture and histories have been enacted in space and through language. While Cree has been named one of the three Indigenous languages that remain ‘viable’ by Statistics Canada, Arcand realized that her own inability to speak the language meant that in her family, the language was extinct. *Here on Future Earth* (2009) first appears as a series of nostalgic, soft-edged views of small-town Saskatchewan streetscapes. However, Arcand’s intervention quickly reveals itself in a simple act of détournement, performed in her desire to “see things where they weren’t.” By manipulating all visible street signage in the images, replacing English with Cree syllabics, Arcand proposes a radical shift to an Indigenous-centred worldview enacted through language. In bending our presumptions of the photograph as a document of past-time, she imagines an alternative past/present/future, at once “a present beside itself,” to quote Cree writer and theorist Billy-Ray Belcourt, and a future within arm’s length. As a public intervention, three images from the series are reproduced on the facades of Vancouver’s three downtown Canada Line stations: City Centre, Yaletown-Roundhouse and Waterfront. Returned to the street, the photographs’ Cree wordage challenges the visual cacophony of existing images and signage of this settler city built upon unceded Indigenous ground.

Kapwani Kiwanga’s practice also plays with the elastic potential of photographic time. Drawing upon both archival and invented documents, her process is at once investigative and imaginative. With research interests ranging from Afrofuturism and science fiction to the anti-colonial struggle, as well as investigations into more apocryphal histories that have, as she says, “fallen through the cracks,” the Paris-based Canadian artist persistently weaves together fiction and fact. *Subduction Studies* (2017) proposes an intersection of geology and the imaginary, the title describing the sites where the earth’s tectonic plates converge and collide. The series considers the geological hypothesis Pangaea Ultima, which predicts a re-merger of all continents into a single supercontinent, with Europe sliding underneath Africa some 200 million years in the future. In each work, Kiwanga selects two geological samples from the collection of the Natural History Museum in Paris and photographs them. By creasing the prints, Kiwanga aligns the two dissimilar rocks; one image, a rock from the European side of the strait of Gibraltar, the other a sample originating in a North African country on the Mediterranean shore – whereby fold line becomes fault line – and effectively enacts the eons-long geologic process of tectonic convergence. Through this straightforward material manipulation, the artist proposes a future collision of the African and European continents, and –given the current reception of migrant communities by Europeans – one can read the work as materializing colonial anxieties about the African “Other.”

For Kenyan/British artist Grace Ndiritu, photographic time stretches beyond the geological to the cosmological: each photograph that comes into existence, she attests, is a microcosmic instance of the macrocosm of the universe. Since 2010, Ndiritu has been developing an encyclopedic archive, *A Quest For Meaning (AQFM)*. Originating through non-rational methodologies and shamanic journeys, it proposes a universal narrative spoken through the photographic image, a creation story from the beginning of time itself, linking seemingly disparate objects and events from the flash of light that was the Big Bang – the original photographic event, one might argue – until our present day. Each time it is exhibited, new photographic constellations perpetually expand the themes in *AQFM*, suggestive of Silverman’s assertion that “photography is […] an ontological calling card: it helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies.” Installed upon colour-blocked walls that Ndiritu calls “Bright Young Things,” the artist’s material and compositional strategies disrupt and confound her viewers’ presumptions about what they are looking at (the installation’s subtitle is Painting as a Medium of Photography). Is the small photograph of Eugène Delacroix’s *Death of Sardanapalus* (1827) hanging in the Louvre, for example, taken by the artist or ripped from the pages of an early edition of Gardner’s Art History textbook? The scale, composition and colouring of the image make it difficult to discern. Are the archival images captured during the Rif War between Morocco and Spain original or re-photographed? It is hard not to read them through current tensions over contemporary migration from both North and Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. As a further play on expansion and proliferation, a special edition of Ndiritu’s *AQFM* newspaper, featuring the artist’s essay “The End of History,” is available free to take away, and “colonizes” the CAG’s ground floor windows.

Kara Uzelman’s artistic practice suggests an interruption to mega-production and the disposable object and consistently re-evaluates the potential for alternative sources of meaning beyond what is understood on the surface. Uzelman’s processes of excavating, gathering and inventing act as a kind of self-directed study of her surroundings; the specificities of site and collecting become the means to speculate on possible stories embedded in found and discarded materials, as well as a way to explore time as a non-linear form. While the past, as literary theorist Susan Stewart argues, “is constructed from a set of presently existing pieces,” the collection looks to the future. In the way that a collection is never static, Uzelman’s work is experimental: there is no defined end-form or completion until the collector’s own demise. *Perpetual Motion* (2018) is part of an ongoing series of new works initiated through a field trip to an abandoned farmyard near Speers, Saskatchewan. Once occupied by the artist’s grandfather, the farm was eventually lost and Uzelman’s grandfather became focussed on designing a perpetual motion machine. Despite having met him only a handful of times, Uzelman inherited his notes and drawings. By way of delving into this history, in *Perpetual Motion* the photograph becomes the conduit that unites site with collected objects and information, functioning as the “glue” in an assemblage. As Cadava suggests in Words of Light, “the photograph is always related to something other than itself. Sealing the traces of the past within its space-crossed image, it also lets itself be (re)touched by its relation to the future.” Through the manipulation of the collected materials, chronology becomes dislocated, and photographs become tools for future use in an as-yet unnamed context.

The fugitive and cyclical are ongoing starting points for Colin Miner, whose work traces the ontological anxiety that, in his words, “shadows” the photographic. Considering qualities of lightness, darkness, reflection and refraction, Miner seeks to evoke rather than capture photography’s qualities of relation. In *The Blue Hour,* a constellation of disparate objects and images are brought together to create converging lines of inquiry, which elliptically surface and resurface. Here, Miner approaches the photograph as a state of suspension; a manifestation of “space-crossed time.” Plaster and latex casts of dust covers for photographic equipment (collected by the artist for potential future use) are tinted by different hues of red light thrown by two neon sculptures whose spiral forms recall early 20th century Czech physician Jan Purkinje’s empirical studies of afterimages in the eye. A large-scale print portrays the slippage of silver emulsion across the surface of a photographic plate – quite literally, an image of photography’s unfixed state. This movement of glittering emulsion is echoed once again in the diminutive but mesmerizing video *Untitled (snail) *(2017), which follows, in an endless loop, the barely perceptible movement of a large Peruvian snail – an animal which, one might argue, both secretes time and carries it upon its back. As writer Jacqueline Mabey remarks about Miner’s work, in a statement that might also be applied to the conditions of photography as a whole, “you can try to fix the image, but it will never stick. The temporality of the photograph is not the ‘there-then’ but contains the kernel of potential futures, held in eternal ‘yet-could-be.’”

Curated by Kimberly Phillips

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival.
Grace Ndiritu’s participation is generously supported by The British Council.

Joi T. Arcand’s Here on Future Earth is installed at Yaletown-Roundhouse, Vancouver City Centre and Waterfront Canada Line Stations from April 6 to September 16, 2018.


ProgramGuideSpring2018.pdf

A photo with a red car driving down a street past stores and buildings, the background a clear sky. The text on the awnings has been replaced with Cree syllabics. The corners of the image are round. 

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Three framed photographs of rocks hang in a gallery space. Each frame contains two folded photographs of rocks that connect at the fold to create an image of one, composite rock.

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Installation image of the group show The Blue Hour. There are various works that range from sculptural pieces sitting on the floor, neon light fixtures installed on the wall, and photographic works. 

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Installation image of the group show The Blue Hour. A variety of framed photographs that differ in size hang on the wall alongside colour blocks painted on the wall.

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Framed and unframed photographs of different sizes sit leaning against a wall of a gallery space. Placed in a group with some photographs overlapping others, the images are of various found objects. 

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Seven framed photographs hang in a horizontal line on the wall of a gallery. The images depict various Saskatchewan rural buildings with signs in Cree syllabics, all with a blue sky above. 

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Exterior of the Yaletown Roundhouse Station with a large, vinyl photograph installed on the facade. In the photograph, a person bicycles past a building with a large sign in Cree syllabics on top.

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Exterior image of Yaletown Roundhouse Station with a large-scale photograph installed on the facade. The photograph depicts a small-town Saskatchewan streetscape with its signage in Cree syllabics.

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Joi T. Arcand, Kapwani Kiwanga, Colin Miner, Grace Ndiritu, Kara Uzelman

The Blue Hour

The Contemporary Art Gallery opened a unique group exhibition that brought together six British Colombia artists who use the journey as a way to engage with landscape traditions. In *Sentimental Journey*, all the artists went on expeditions, traversing the landscape to collect inspiration and gather materials to document their experiences. The works in Sentimental Journey were both real and fictive representations of often undetermined treks. Many of the works had an optimism that was tied to the landscape, the desire to be outside and the character of the artist/wanderer.

The art works in this context brought forward the tight relation between the journey and its presentation, embracing the romance of the journey while also recontextualizing and privileging the terms of storytelling in order to question sentimentality. *Sentimental Journey* captured sentiments of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism.  Most of the artists in the exhibition kept true to this tradition, using the journey as their primary source of inspiration, translating their journeys materially to create a new experience in its own right. As many of the works in the exhibition showed us, our visual fields are saturated with representations of landscapes, but here the artist’s to reinvigorate our perception of nature through their distinctive working methods.

### Essay by Jenifer Papararo

Romanticism developed across Europe as a movement in visual art, literature and music; it was defined as a return to nature and a search for true understanding of the self. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was identified as a pioneer of Romanticism, crossed the Alps alone on foot, expressing his experience in his autobiography, *Confessions*, published in 1782. The purpose of his long and isolated journeys, Rousseau states, was “to show to my fellow-men a portrait in every way true to nature, and this man I shall portray will be myself.” This desire to find an authentic self is defined by the attempt to break with societal constraints that limit choices and actions and, accordingly, limit the ability to understand and convey the experience of the true self.

This notion of the Romantic thinker—focused on finding and defining the true inner self—reaches across place, time and disciplines. We can easily point to this figure again and again in the visual arts. The romantic artist lingers and is now an identifiable character and at times a caricature of the artist in general. Common to much contemporary art discourse since the mid-twentieth century is a suspicion of this romantic figure and what it represents. Romanticism has always had its critics. Terms such as *sentimental*, *idealistic*, *spiritual*, *individualistic* and *emotional* have commonly been used to undermine the political gestures of Romanticism. Romance is a distraction, interfering with realism and its revolutionary intent. In relation to contemporary art the term is often used derogatorily, disassociated from the political and defined by self-interest; as a movement for the individual. This is characterized by Rousseau’s statement, “Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist.”

*The Wanderer* (1818) by the German painter Casper David Friederich represents a paradigm of this physical and spiritual journey. A lone figure, his back to the picture plane, stands on a mountainous peak above the clouds, observing the vast valley below. Is this isolated figure in a landscape, shown within nature’s awesomeness, enough to convey the experience? Do Friederich’s intentions move beyond evoking the individualistic nature of these transcendental moments and our isolation as humans? Or does he simply intend the work to replicate the experience of awe for the viewer, hoping the representation itself elicits this feeling? A primary question for many artists in this exhibition might have been: Is the pictorial portrayal of the journey enough to capture the interests of a viewer? This led to other questions, such as: Should what is displayed replicate the journey? Does it even need to? Does it represent the experience, or is it a thing unto itself? Are process and presentation so intertwined that they become one, or do they function so differently that there will always be a huge gap between them?

Within the ideals of historical Romanticism, the artwork, like nature, should be experiential. Symbolically, according to the Romantics, nature carries a charge that elicits a transcendental response. This response corresponds, fundamentally, to a sense of awe. I have no doubt that the natural world still carries the power to inspire awe, but it is also hard to ignore how mediated our experiences are. Thus in a true Romantic sense, the goal of a work of art is to elicit emotional response. *Sentimental Journey* was a group exhibition of local artists whose working methods capture sentiments of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism. Most of the artists in the exhibition kept true to this tradition using the journey as their primary source of inspiration, translating their journeys materially, to create a new experience in its own right. As many of the works in the exhibition showed us, our visual fields are saturated with representations of landscapes, and the artist/explorer character is now relegated to the role of day tripper, seeming more performative than earnest.

The Enlightenment’s ideas of reason and rationality are foils to the true Romantic. The precisely ordered ideals and experiences of the Age of Reason become caricatures, something to react against and resist with intuitive response. Who would rationally use a ball as reason enough to embark on a two-month journey from Canada’s west coast to northeast India? Who would enter the woods blindfolded or attempt to build an anti-gravity machine? While not all the artists in *Sentimental Journey* make nature their works’ primary subject, each begins a journey motivated by creative impulse. The work tended to be about their experiences and how those are exhibited, raising questions about the way the artist’s experience translates materially to the viewer through the objects or information presented. For some of these artists, their work must not only recount their travels but also be reenacted, yielding an impact that conveys their journey’s essence, while for others it is more of a slow burn—playing out over many objects and images, unfolding as narrative.

It is clear there is a new Romanticism in the air. It is being wholeheartedly embraced and not filtered tightly through reason or ordered precisely. Of course there are questions. The Romantic figure of the lonely artist who focuses on self-discovery is still a character seen, with some suspicion, as self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. And nature’s ability to produce a transformative sense of awe that gives the individual a deeper understanding of the self has lost some of its edge. Yet, each work in the exhibition carries an optimism that was tied to Romantic notions of creativity.

Essay: "Sentimental Journey," Jenifer Papararo

A round glass jug sits on an iron support. Water fills one third of the bottle. 

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A dark room with a bench in front of a projection on a screen. It depicts tree tops and distant mountains. In the middle of the frame, a tree with a hole showing the mountains in the back.

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An image of a glass vase suspended in the air with string alongside another glass vase on a stand in a gallery. On the back wall, a framed illustration hangs. The frame is half gold, and half white. 

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Installation shot of the group show Sentimental journey. A pitched camouflage tent sits on the right side of a gallery. On the left, three images hang on the wall and a tv sits in a corner. 

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On the left corner wall, a salon style assortment of framed images, text, notes and objects hang on the wall of a gallery. On the right side, three images hang on the wall and a tv sits in the corner.

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A variety of objects are placed on top, inside, and underneath a display case in a gallery space. Along with that, rolled up fabric hangs off the bottom of the case while shoes sit at the bottom. 

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Michael Drebert, Owen Kydd, Mike McLean & Laura Trunkey, Gareth Moore, Kevin Schmidt, Kara Uzelman

Sentimental Journey

*LANDSCAPE* is the first in a series of three publications that used the petit genres of landscape, still life and portraiture to reflect programming at the Contemporary Art Gallery which framed tendencies in contemporary art.

Published by the Contemporary Art Gallery in 2010, contributing writers include Michael Turner and Jenifer Papararo, as well as interviews between Tim Gardner and Stephen Waddell; and BGL and Adrian Blackwell. This publication includes the exhibitions; BGL, Tim Gardner and *Sentimental Journey*.

### Other publications from this series:

*STILL LIFE*

*PORTRAIT*

Purchase all three publications for $25 below.

Kara Uzelman

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