Capture Catalogue 2019

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Capture Head Office 305 Cambie St Vancouver BC V6B 2N4 capturephotofest.com info@capturephotofest.com

Capture Photography Festival is produced by the Capture Photography Festival Society, a registered not-for-profit society. Please share your Festival experience with us at capturephotofest.com/2019-survey


2019

Director Kate Henderson Festival Manager Jaclyn Arndt Festival Coordinator Adrienne Rempel Communications Coordinator Brit Bachmann Community Engagement & Education Assistant Laura Noonan Graphic Design Vicky Lum Digital Image Editing Alina Ilyasova Website Sparkjoy Studios Printed in Vancouver by Mitchell Press Front and Back Covers Krista Belle Stewart, Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019

All content © 2019 the artists, authors, and Capture Photography Festival Society. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. All images are reproduced courtesy of the artist unless otherwise specified. Capture is not responsible for the specific content or subject matter of any work displayed or advertised. Some exhibitions or installations may be offensive, upsetting, or disturbing to some members of the public. For the most up-to-date exhibition and event information, please visit: capturephotofest.com

Board of Directors Mike Harris Emmy Lee Wall Ian McGuffie Eric Savics Kim Spencer-Nairn CHAIR David Thorpe Todd Towers Founding Donors John and Nina Cassils Stephen Carruthers Chan Family Foundation Mike and Sandra Harris Brian and Andrea Hill Hy’s of Canada Ltd. Jane Irwin and Ross Hill Jason and AJ McLean Michael O’Brian Family Foundation Radcliffe Foundation Ron Regan Eric Savics and Kim Spencer-Nairn Leonard Schein Ian and Nancy Telfer Samantha J. Walker (in memory of) Bruce Wright Anonymous Anonymous


CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

PUBLIC ART 12 – 36

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS 38 – 59

ARTICLES 60 – 69

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 74 – 106

EVENTS 110 – 129

YOUTH PROGRAM 132 – 140

CALENDAR 152 – 154

MAP 156 – 157

GALLERY INDEX 158

ARTIST INDEX 159


WELCOME

Kate Henderson, Director

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


THANK YOU

Kim Spencer-Nairn, Board Chair and Founder

Neil Aisenstat David Allison Susan Almrud Grant Arnold Michael Audain Yoshi Audain Jan Ballard Mark Ballard Linda Banecevic Phuong Banh Nadia Belerique Nancy Bendsten Niels Bendsten Ryanne Bergler Peggy Bochun Sophie Brodovitch Rudy Buttignol MaryAnn Camilleri Elysse Chaffe Lisa Chase Brad Chernoff Susanne Chow Holly Clarke Dana Claxton Robyn Croft Jeff Curry Anna D’Avignon Shaun Dacey Andrea Rose Des Mazes Katherine Dennis Frank Doll Dennis Dong Andrya Duff Conrad Dykman Diane Evans Liana Evans Barbara Fairbrother Eric Fiss Sharon Fortney James Francom Jeff Fuller Roxanne Gagnon Lise Gaudette John Goldsmith Viviane Gosselin Kate Grauer Danielle Green Andrew Greenson Nikki Hadley Michael Hanos Helen Hayter Ross Hill Dave Ingram Lindsay Inouye Shaun Inouye

Jane Irwin Megan Jenkins Gareth Jones Alexandra Kuskowski Paul Larocque Ken Lee Jessica Liebenberg Sabrina Loeprich Dean Long Brenda Longland Lise Magee Scott Massey Jenny-Anne McCowan Marnie McFadden Steve McGregor AJ McLean Jason McLean Gregg McNally Brian Messina Chris Miller Laura Moore Nelson Mouëllic Justin Muir Charity Munro Norm Ng Chris Nicholson Inna O’Brian Michael O’Brian Shane O’Brien Helga Pakasaar Gale Penhall Robin Peterson Brenna Pett Glenna Pollon Susan Powelson Nigel Prince Justin Ramsey Hannah Reinhart Tobi Reyes Mia Riddler Corey Robinson Monique Rodrigues Debra Rolfe Susan Rowley Denise Ryner Stephanie Savage Rachel Sawatsky Carol Sawyer Jamie Scoular Reid Shier Danny Singer Janet Smith Cassidy Smith Patryk Stasieczek Bill Storey

Andy Sylvester Rachel Topham Biliana Velkova Mauro Vescera Alex Waber Stephen Waddell Emmy Lee Wall Ian Wallace Stephanie Wesik Michael Wesik Robert Willis Coach Wilson Helen Wong Lucas Wright Michael Young Karen Zalamea

And a very special thank you to all the 2019 Capture Volunteers.

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A MESSAGE FROM …

A Message from the Global Head of Sustainability and Corporate Citizenship, TD Bank Group On behalf of TD, I’d like to congratulate the organizers and contributors of the 2019 Capture Photography Festival for putting together an inspiring collection of contemporary artwork. Art plays such a powerful role in building vibrant, connected communities. It can help bring people together by sparking conversations; raise awareness on issues that are not only impacting people locally but also reach across borders; and foster a sense of belonging as viewers relate to the story behind a piece. That’s why we are committed to supporting arts and culture that reflect diverse voices for a more inclusive tomorrow. We believe that when people feel included and participate in their community, good things happen. As part of our corporate citizenship platform, The Ready Commitment, we are proud to work with organizations like Capture that are helping to build an inclusive arts community that embodies the rich dynamics and culture of Canada.

Andrea Barrack, Global Head, Sustainability and Corporate Citizenship TD Bank Group

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


A Message from Premier John Horgan

A Message from the Hon. Lisa Beare Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture

As Premier of the Province of British Columbia, I extend my warmest welcome to everyone attending attractions throughout Metro Vancouver for the 6th Annual Capture Photography Festival.

On behalf of Premier John Horgan and the Government of British Columbia, I would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone attending the 2019 Capture Photography Festival.

Photographic arts are a powerful tool for expression and a wonderful way to reflect and share our culture. The annual series of art exhibits, talks, workshops, and lens-related events offered through this festival creates fantastic opportunities for people throughout our communities to take in stimulating media and engage in inspiring discussion. Through these types of activities, we can all appreciate the vibrant diversity of our province and grow our understanding of our environment, our neighbours, and ourselves.

This event is Western Canada’s largest lens-based art festival, featuring both local and international photographers. It is an excellent opportunity to view the stunning images caputured by top photographers from around the world, being exhibited at dozens of galleries and other venues throughout Metro Vancouver.

This year promises an exciting program, and I want to thank the artists, organizers, and volunteers for their hard work making Capture Photography Festival an ongoing success. I hope you all take full advantage of this chance to support local talent and see the impact of varied lens-based art. Enjoy the experience!

In British Columbia, we are proud to have a vibrant arts and culture sector that spans the province. Our government is committed to supporting the pivotal role that arts and culture play in building a creative and sustainable economy that works for people. We are pleased to fund this festival through the BC Arts Council. Events like Capture Photography Festival contribute to the growth of BC’s creative economy by helping artists build their careers and advance their profiles internationally. As well, the festival’s tours, films, and artist talks provide valuable opportunities to connect and learn from other artists and industry representatives. I would like to thank Capture Photography Festival for hosting this event. I also want to acknowledge all the volunteers and sponsors whose involvement and support make this festival possible. Best wishes to everyone attending this year’s festival. For those who are visiting, I hope your time in BC is memorable and that you have the chance to explore some of the worldclass amenties Vancouver has to offer.

John Horgan, Premier of British Columbia

Hon. Lisa Beare, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture

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SUPPORTERS Presented by

Major Supporting Sponsor

Supporting Sponsors

Media Sponsors

Contributing Sponsors

We gratefully acknowledge the support of

In-Kind Sponsors

Partners

burrardartsfoundation

VAPA CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


April 3, 2019

7–8:30 pm

Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver

CAPTURE 2019 FESTIVAL LAUNCH

Elizabeth Milton, A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes, performance documentation, 2018. Photo: Richard Clark

Join us for the kickoff of the 2019 Festival following the first Capture Speaker Series talk, with Deanna Bowen (p. 112). Music, food and drink, and artists in attendance.

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CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Tom Hsu, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, 2019, installation mockup, part of the 2019 Canada Line Public Art Project

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Christina Battle, the view from here, 2019, part of the 2019 Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project: Signals in the Sea, curated by Jayne Wilkinson (p. 22)


Public Art


Every year, Capture programs a Public Art Program designed to engage and challenge audiences, invite discussion around critical issues, and expand ideas of what lens-based art can be. The installations are sited across Metro Vancouver and many are developed in collaboration with and supported by our community and organizational partners from around the region.

PUBLIC ART

Krista Belle Stewart, Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019, digitally manipulated photograph on vinyl, installation mock-up. Photo: Nelson MouĂŠllic

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


BC HYDRO DAL GRAUER SUBSTATION PUBLIC ART PROJECT EARTHBOUND MNEMONIC

Krista Belle Stewart

April 2019–March 2020

Curated by Kate Henderson, Capture Photography Festival

944 Burrard St, Vancouver

Completed in 1954, the BC Hydro’s Dal Grauer Substation was designed by the young architect Ned Pratt and artist B. C. Binning. The building was commissioned by the B.C. Electric Company, under the helm of then-president Edward Albert “Dal” Grauer, to bridge functional design and public art. The substation would go on to serve as a threedimensional “canvas” that was said to resemble a Piet Mondrian or De Stijl painting.

Presented in partnership with Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association

The modernist philosophy with which the building was designed emphasizes the link between art, architecture, and everyday life. With this in mind, Capture Photography Festival has commissioned artists annually to create new site-specific works to be installed on the Dal Grauer Substation’s facade. Drawing on the building itself, these projects temporarily emphasize the substation in the streetscape and reassert it as an architectural icon. Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Sylix/Okanagan Nation and a Vancouver-based artist. Stewart works with video, land, performance, photography, textiles, and sound, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. For Earthbound Mnemonic (2019), Stewart used as source material a photograph of tiles she made out of earth from her home in Spaxomin, which she then digitally manipulated and coloured in red and copper to create a visually and contextually multilayered work.

Krista Belle Stewart is in conversation with writer Tania Willard as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 16 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 113).

Public Art

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1 Krista Belle Stewart Indian Momento, 2016, installation view, In search of Expo 67, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017, Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Guy L’Heureux

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CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


ORTHOGONAL HEART LINE: INTERSECTING THE COLONIAL GRID Tania Willard Classic Colonial style Colonial window Colonial column Colonial house plans Colonial countertops Colonial marble and granite Colonial farms Colonial grid Colonial

In early colonial buildings and cabins in the Americas, windows were made of mica, waxed linen, or paper. Glass windows did not become common until shipping routes and time frames were shortened between the colony and the Crown. Until ships plundering the “New World’s” gold became wealthy and steady enough to supply the colonies with such civilized things as windows. I want to take a minute to think about windows not existing. Seeing the land only when you decide to go outside, and in that act being part of it, the land around you. Windows allow us to pretend we are separate: we are inside, and we consider outside as being behind an invisible barrier, a transparent separation. A window is one of the many things that has a colonial story, that we navigate within an architecture of coloniality. Small windows in early log cabin missions and forts have become glass-walled petrochemical office towers, and glass and windows the world over symbolize the contemporary moment of urban and controlled spaces. This is the classic colonial grid. We frame views in windows, we sell products in window displays, we block wind and reflect sky with windows that climb higher and higher to frame better, more expansive, more expensive views. Photography can be thought of as a distribution of views through windows. Made up of lenses of melted sand and mineral flooding across ice-thin sheets and exposed to sunlight. Colloidal silver, glass plate, negatives, all are methods of taking pictures of views framed within a window, exposed onto a window, and then developed into another view. There is a colonial grid in all these windows. Not all windows consume, not all glass eats up the sun. I want to understand that a window can be something else. In Krista Belle Stewart’s new work, Earthbound Mnemonic (2019), installed on the windows of the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation in downtown

Vancouver, windows become not about seeing in or about separation; instead, they are containers. Stasis chambers for story. Caring for and keeping narrative in a state of stable care to promote its longevity, to allow story to take a long journey like the multilightyear expeditions of science-fiction astronauts. This long archive of story can be understood more deeply when we realize the work’s source imagery is made up of digitally altered photographs of the artist’s earthen tiles from the installation Eye Eye (2018). In this earlier work, Stewart worked with soil from her home in Spaxomin (Douglas Lake, BC) and formed and fired it into tiles, which are installed in a grid pattern on the gallery wall. Subtle variations in earth and mineral create small portals through which we look into the land, not out of a window at it. Stewart’s installation on forty-eight windowpanes of the Dal Grauer interrupts the colonial grid with striking red and copper forms that outline the bloodline of this story. Drawing from her work with grids, familial and relational narratives, histories of colonial-settler relations, and the archive, this new work positions the earthen tiles as an abstraction of the process of the earlier Eye Eye work. The source image of Earthbound Mnemonic is these same earthen tiles, photographed in the kiln—lining its sides, stacked up, and arranged—in the process of firing. This photograph reflects the artist’s process and acts of translation, which are key concepts in many of her works that are iterations of the “historical.” Locating the deep geological time and the living Syilx presence on the land, each tile in Eye Eye represents a deep archive of life lived in relationship to the land. Further abstracted in Earthbound Mnemonic, the process of the tiles’ making is still evident, but coded. As coded and deep as our own bloodlines. Presented with the final image, we are left to infer our own meaning, a process of divination that asks our own cultural selves and diverse embodied

Public Art

1 See, for example, the image at Owen Geiger, “Thompson Indian Tribal Pithouse,” Natural Building Blog, April 12, 2014, http://www. naturalbuildingblog.com/ thompson-indian-tribalpithouse.

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2&3 Krista Belle Stewart, Eye Eye (detail), 2018, Courtesy of the artist

narratives to read the work. I see: an underground home, a traditional pithouse, an Indigenous architecture, a home. These copper and red forms could be read spatially in reference to one another; some are stacked and some intersect in oblique, as opposed to gridlike, meeting points within the embrace of a hexagonal structure. This is remarkably like the log-frame structure of an underground home: four central pillars support a hexagonal frame, with log sides stacked ladderlike on top of this frame, and bark, tree boughs, and earth used for the roof.¹ This architecture is itself an archive, as coded teachings and cultural knowledges inform it, set in a balance of reciprocity between the people and the land and the story. Story is always part of the land and part of the structure.

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The speculative architecture in Stewart’s image is only my reading. It strikes me that the inversion at play in the work operates at many levels: in the inverted role of the land and its relationship to a framing device; in a window and a lens, or a window as a lens; in the intensity of the colour shift between the copper and the red vinyl; and in the idea of the archive as a humancentric historical device. Here archive is not made by us, but includes us and our stories on the land, both in the past and more recently. Perhaps it is not surprising that when I first saw the work without any context regarding its creation process, I thought it was a graphic version of an underground home or kekuli. These geometries are themselves coded in relationship to the land and to us. These stories have always arrived in stasis, and awake when they are called upon.

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That it is in stasis does not mean the story is unshifting—grids are made of orthogonal lines that meet at right angles or, in art history, that denote a vanishing point. In the case of Earthbound Mnemonic, Stewart points to her process of “iterative representation,” explaining that “history is understood through multiple (re-)mediations.” This grid has become a container of possibilities, outcomes, and narrative; relations are held at right or intersecting angles to each other, not in rigidity but in care and interrelatedness. The vanishing point is another interesting implication for this work within the context of Stewart’s practice. A vanishing point in the pictorial tradition of perspective can also be correlated to the concept of the “vanishing race,” which is much more about the suppression of Indigenous culture and taking of Indigenous lands, or, as professor of anthropology Audra Simpson puts it, “what was being lost was not culture but land—Indian

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


4 Krista Belle Stewart, Indian Artists at Work (detail), 2016, Courtesy of the artist

land, and lots of it.”² There is no vanishing point in Stewart’s image. If anything, it appears as an aerial topography suggestive of structure; in fact, it is a representation of an intimate process and a human scale of materials and creation. This scale has subsequently shifted in the final installation of the work: the intimate process of relationship to material, to cultural narrative, and to iconography has been scaled up to architectural size into an image that becomes an aesthetic of coded stories. Another story one could tell about vanishing lands and peoples in the wake of colonial grids is about energy grids. The Dal Grauer building is an electrical power substation designed in the modernist moment to reveal, through its glass exterior, a celebration of electrical consumption. Hydro power in this province exists in the dubious realm of self-affirming settler-owned or Crown land. We do not have to look far into Earth’s archive, the history in the land, to see that most of the province’s energy comes from Indigenous resources. While this heritage-status building is lauded as a confluence of engineering and art—appearing, as it is sometimes said, like a Piet Mondrian or De Stijl painting—Stewart’s practice is well honed in both interrupting these grids and also in adopting them into relation with her own aesthetics. Extending the continuity of relationality, the work, installed on the building’s central bank of windows, is held between the De Stijl architectural reference. This recontextualization reveals other translations and inversions at play in the work. Every time this story is awakened, it entertains a new telling.

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Kriste Belle Stewart’s image suggests a speculative architecture, an archive of land laddered onto a contextualizing grid. Do these hexagonal lines and markings disrupt the colonial grid or assert their own structure amid it? If this story is in a slow-shifting stasis—in a chrysalis of narrative—then this narrative of historical (re-)mediation may be travelling to the edges of the universe, in this stasis chamber, to the futurity that was eclipsed by colonial constructs. This is an orthogonal heart line, reaching back in time to the ancestral and simultaneously forward into the unknown, and always intersecting with story. Archives of land are like that—existing in specks of dust and vast expanses at the same time, scaling story as it shifts. 2 Audra Simpson, “Why White People Love Franz Boas; or, The Grammar of Indigenous Dispossession,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, ed. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 169.

Public Art

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CAPTURE LIMITED EDITIONS

Capture is pleased to announce the addition of Krista Belle Stewart's Earthbound Mnemonic (2019) to the Capture Limited Editions series.

Krista Belle Stewart Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019 Edition of 34, $100

All proceeds from sales of editions, which range in price from just $100 to $400, support Capture Photography Festival Society, a non-profit cultural organization.

Nadia Belerique In the Belly of a Cat, 2018 Edition of 30, $300

To purchase, email info@capturephotofest.com or visit https://squareup.com/store/capturephotofest/

Dana Claxton WHY, 2014 Edition of 30, $300 Jessica Eaton DG Weave, 2015 Edition of 50, SOLD OUT Scott Massey Spectrum Study 4 (infrared), 2014 Edition of 50, $100 Alex Morrison Brand New Era Social Club, 2017 Edition of 40, $350 Birthe Piontek Trouts, 2013 Edition of 50, $100 Danny Singer Trossachs, 2005/2014 Edition of 100, $200 Patryk Stasieczek Tactile Compositional Iteration, 2016 Varied edition of 30, $123 Stephen Waddell The Collector and Showroom, 2016 Edition of 50, $350 Ian Wallace Clayoquot Protest (August 9, 1993), 1993/2015 Edition of 50, $400

View all the Capture Limited Editions on the Capture Photography Festival website at capturephotofest.com/capture-limited-editions/

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Krista Belle Stewart Earthbound Mnemonic, 2019 21″ × 14″ Screenprint of a digitally manipulated photograph Courtesy of the artist Edition of 24 + 2 APs $100

Public Art

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PATTISON OUTDOOR BILLBOARDS PUBLIC ART PROJECT SIGNALS IN THE SEA

Christina Battle Eshrat Erfanian Susan Schuppli

April 3–30

Curated by Jayne Wilkinson

Sited on 7 billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St (between 5th and 6th Ave), Vancouver and 4 billboards at the corner of Quebec St and 5th Ave, Vancouver

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Curator Jayne Wilkinson delivers a talk as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 9 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 112) and hosts a DIM Cinema event on Wed. Apr 10 at 7:30 pm (see p. 120).

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

5 Susan Schuppli, Disaster Film, 2019, installation mock-up

2019


From the shore, the sea is a horizon. From the sea, the shore is a distant line. Both perspectives construct oceanic space from the imaginary of what is below the surface and beyond sight. For citizens of previous centuries, mapping the oceans meant drawing lines around infinite expanses and filling them with imagined monsters and mythic creatures. Our oceans are not so different, except that mythic beings have been replaced by non-human sentience of other kinds. The contemporary ocean is full of sensing devices, data streams, fibre-optic networks and powerful deep-sea submersibles. But this infrastructure rarely comes into public view. When it does, it looks much like we might expect—wires, cables, submarines. It’s difficult to connect these objects of the network with the sublime imagery the ocean still conjures. For this multi-site project, I invited three artists, whose work is informed by the intersection of environmentalism and digital technologies of seeing, sensing, and communication, to produce site-specific work for a series of outdoor billboards in Vancouver. Signals in the Sea is a project about the tensions between human vision (or what we see at the surface) and non-human vision (or what we know about a depth). It is about how we might sense environments beyond an exclusively visual realm and about how our relationship with, and proximity to, the ocean might be a way of situating ourselves in the environmentally fraught present. Here the sea becomes a symbol, or signal, for the distances between humans and our non-human kin. With different aesthetic approaches, artists Eshrat Erfanian, Susan Schuppli, and Christina Battle each find in the sea and its surfaces a metaphor for the concealment (or containment) of information. Vancouver is a city where everyone desires to see something—ocean, mountains, sky—from where they are, and the Pacific shoreline creates the economic value of “the view.” But how can we know about what exists beyond our sightlines, about what exists at a distance? Even as remote-sensing technologies are refined and adapted, giving us precise information about the deepest, coldest, deadliest parts of the sea, those spaces remain largely inaccessible to us. Humans can’t survive underwater, after all. Eshrat Erfanian presents two horizons on opposite sides of a single billboard. On one side, the expanse of the sea’s surface unfolds in ripples before us. Delicate letters placed along the horizon, where the sea and sky meet, spell out a fact of contemporary life: there is no place to run to. It is an evocative phrase, and seems fatalistic at first. Does it suggest the plight of global refugees and the climate change crises that have forced many to run, fleeing

homes that have become (politically, ethically, environmentally) unliveable? At one time, the sea was a signifier of escape, since what existed beyond its great horizon was largely unknown. The edges of our world are no longer invisible—the limits are mapped, and the resources and requirements of life are in increasingly short supply. The horizon was once a signal from the future, a place to run toward, but is no longer.

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On the flip side, the horizon is continually unfolding in a kaleidoscopic, even psychedelic image. Using the same refracted blue light as the ocean’s surface, Erfanian’s second image is computer-generated, automatic. The optical illusion of an endless, repeating pattern points us outside our own borders, reminding us of ways to sense what is beyond the frame of our singular vision. It is a rendering with no edge, no beginning, no end; it confronts the viewer by positioning them in the same way a horizon does, by making the experience of viewership both subjective and universal. Perhaps reminiscent of the way one can become lost when looking at the sea, here the surface of photographic representation is shattered. Here, the horizon is in us. We want to believe this fantasy—that the sea is a space that never ends—but in less than a century, humans have made quick work of the ocean’s life systems, allowing corporate interests to intervene. In 2010, a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by the explosion of a deep-water drilling rig owned and operated by British Petroleum (BP), released a continuous stream of crude oil into the gulf, causing a miles-wide oil slick. Even as BP tried to control the media access to the site, the mixing oil and water became a slick surface that was visible from above. At the shoreline, the eventual reach of the spill decimated marine life by covering everything in glossy black goo; the three-month long continual release of oil thousands of feet below was visible online through livestream. Susan Schuppli’s Disaster Film (2019) adapts her ongoing research into the material evidence of the BP oil spill, as well as environmental “accidents” more broadly. The billboard series interprets the various visualities of surfaces and depths, suggesting the multiple sites of an unfolding disaster: the underwater plume where oil gushed, the mixing of oil and water at the

Public Art

6 Eshrat Erfanian, no place to run to, 2019

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7 Christina Battle, the view from here, 2019

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sea’s surface, and the aerial view from above, where the oil became a rainbow pattern of refracted light. Critically, these images are not representations of the spill itself (which was a spectacular media event on its own) but are computer-generated simulations that intervene into the material context of investigation, and into the idea of the ocean as evidence. Taken in sequence, they form a kind of “oil film”—the technical name for an oil spill—that spreads out across four billboards. The slick surface aesthetics of both oil and CGI point to the difficult beauty of matter out of place. The fear of an earth that is unruly and unstoppable, even with the most masterful of human engineering, is what the BP event signifies. But despite its destruction, it hasn’t changed the number of rigs in the gulf nor the intensity with which oilproducing countries, Canada included, are pushing extraction farther and farther offshore. Our ability to represent such spaces, under heavy surveillance and protected by corporate power, might fall to the very materials we attempt to understand. Schuppli writes that we have entered “a new geo-photo-graphic era in which planetary systems have been transformed into vast photosensitive arrays that are registering and recording the rapid transformations induced by modern industrialization and its contaminating processes.”¹ By combining materials-based research with media, Schuppli’s work demonstrates the toxic in-between spaces of oil and water, of surfaces and depths, and of process and production. Christina Battle’s images are the most directly related to their installation sites, demarcating a presence and immediacy connected to the oceanic and digital economies that serve Vancouver. In this new commission, the view from here (2019), Battle asks viewers and passers-by to think about the digital infrastructure and networks that are obscured by the surfaces of the sea. Even as ships fill the harbour and fibre-optic cables line the ocean floor, it is easy to ignore these economies in favour of the ocean’s romance. By combining Google Earth–sourced

imagery from the specific installation sites, contour lines suggesting varied underwater depths, and lifeforms from an alien world, Battle creates a kind of feedback loop of visual regimes. The Twitterlength poetic texts prompt viewers to ask how they sense, feel, and understand proximity to water. As complex image composites, produced with recourse to satellite imaging and mapping technologies, they remind us that the sea is literally a medium for sending and receiving signals and that it teems with contradictory messages. Environmental art historian T. J. Demos points out that in the visual culture of the Anthropocene (our current, human-defined geological epoch), a notable shift has occurred from photography to high-resolution satellite imagery and remote-sensing technology, scaled to global, even interplanetary measurement. Today, photography consists primarily of images that are automatic and constructed, not mimetic and indexical—Battle’s collages tread in this terrain. Representation does not take the form of a single image, but is instead situated somewhere in the littoral space of an urban shore, within a technosphere that extends from the deepest parts of the ocean to the highest paths of atmospheric satellites. In a 2012 interview, technology theorist Paul Virilio described standing on land and gazing out at the surface of the sea as though looking upon “the marine infinite, the place where the three elements of the biosphere connect: the atmosphere, the end of the lithosphere and the beginning of the hydrosphere. The three limits [are] in short, an extraordinary place.”² We can’t see these points of connection, but, like the connective tissues of our watery human bodies, the oceans are a kind of network medium— the space that carries the signal, that thing that permits transmission. The ocean has long fascinated us perhaps because, despite the newest technologies and most comprehensive remote sensing and scanning, and even despite its vital importance in climate change discourse, there is still much about oceanic space that remains an impossibility.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

1 Susan Schuppli, “Slick Images: The Photogenic Politics of Oil,” in Allegory of the Cave Painting, ed. Mihnea Mirca and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei (Milan: Mousse, 2015), 431. 2 Paul Virilio and Jean-Louis Violeau, “The Littoral as Final Frontier,” Animal Shelter, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 60.

2019



TRANSLINK PUBLIC ART PROJECT

Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station

SKWXWÚ7MESH NATION BASKETBALL

Alana Paterson

April 2019–March 2020

Over the past few years, BC-based photojournalist Alana Paterson has become deeply invested in issues of gender inequality and women’s civil liberties. Paterson’s recent works focus on women’s empowerment through sport, particularly young women at the beginning of their careers. Currently, women represent only 7 percent of sportspeople seen, heard, or read about in the media, and only 4 percent of sports coverage focuses primarily on women. Paterson’s images shed light on this disparity while celebrating women’s strength and resilience in a male-dominated field.

Curated by Kate Henderson, Capture Photography Festival Presented in partnership with TransLink

For her most recent project, Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball (2018), Paterson was invited to shoot with the young women’s half of the Junior All Native Basketball Tournament (JANT), held in Vancouver in 2018. The tournament is made up of over eighty-three teams from fifty nations with U13 and U17 divisions. JANT serves to empower its team members and reinforce that they are strong, resilient young people and talented athletes. After working closely with the team over the past year, the artist has captured each team member’s energy, portraying them as direct, playful and fierce. Paterson’s images work to empower young Indigenous women in the face of continuing racism and intergenerational trauma caused by a dark history of colonization, and the residential school system in Canada. The project both captures a visual identity of Indigenous women through sport and revitalizes the sense of strength, perseverance, and passion for which Indigenous “Warrior Women” are renowned.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


April 13–May 13

The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Ct, N Van

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

A more extensive exhibition of Alana Paterson's Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball, curated by Justin Ramsey, will be on view at The Polygon Gallery from April 13 until May 12, 2019. Join us for the opening reception on Sat, April 13, 1 pm.

Alana Paterson, Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball, 2018, installation mockup (detail)

Public Art

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CANADA LINE PUBLIC ART PROJECT Canada Line Transit Map

April–September 2019

1. Waterfront

Presented in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program—InTransit BC

2. Vancouver City Centre

For the 2019 multi-sited Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lens-based artworks on the exteriors of Canada Line stations throughout Greater Vancouver. This year’s project stretches across seven locations, from Waterfront to Richmond–Brighouse, and includes curatorial contributions from local art organizations Arts Umbrella, Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Richmond Art Gallery.

3. Olympic Village 4. Broadway—City Hall

5. King Edward

Zone 1

Zone 2

6. Lansdowne 7. Richmond—Brighouse

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


1.

Waterfront Station

AN URGE TO PROPOSE FORBIDDEN THOUGHTS AND PLAYING WITH FIRE

Tom Hsu

Curated by Shaun Dacey, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program and City of Richmond

Tom Hsu’s series of seven photographs capture momentary fragments of summer for commuters rushing through the barren corridor at Waterfront Canada Line Station. His intimately cropped imagery of flesh, flora, and fire provoke memories or fantasies of mid-summer wanderings. They produce responses engaging subconscious desires. With a close look, one can visualize the sensation of cold ocean water hitting bare legs or the heat of cinders exploding in a bonfire. Through visual means, Hsu’s work produces sensory experience. The images, all shot on a 35 mm camera, present fragments of moments. Each is an experience stilled and cropped. Whether a midnight foray into the forest or a hot day at the beach, each photograph opens up to endless possible experiences of place. Our city, Vancouver, is an unacknowledged participant throughout the series, always there in the background. Or is it rather our experience of place that imprints the expanded frame of Third Beach or East Van onto these images? Hsu’s work holds a kinship with that of photographers such as Fred Herzog, Robert Frank, and Wolfgang Tillmans. With camera in hand, Hsu is a purposeful wanderer. He documents life around him with an eye for compositions that launch the mundane or ordinary into the wild and electric. Subjects are approached from odd angles, cropping out the larger scene to focus on specific forms. Many viewers have commented on the intimacy his work engenders. There is a playfulness and sensuality born of the physical connections among photographer and subject. The title, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, is a provocation to engage with risk and uncertainty.

Tom Hsu, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, 2019

Public Art

28 – 29


2.

Vancouver City Centre Station

PERFORMING THE GODDESS: CHAPAL BHADURI’S STORY

Naveen Kishore

Curated by Diana Freundl, Associate Curator, Asian Art, Vancouver Art Gallery and Gayatri Sinha, independent curator and founder of Critical Collective

Photographer and filmmaker Naveen Kishore has extensively documented men performing femaleidentified roles in Manipuri, Bengali, and Punjabi theatrical practices. These images were taken during the filming of Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri’s Story (1999), one of Kishore’s most renowned projects to date, in which he revisits the life of iconic Indian stage actor Chapal Bhaduri. Bhaduri is one of few actors who follow a tradition of playing female characters, which flourished in jatra (Bengali folk theatre) until the early 1960s. At one time the star of Bengal’s stage, Bhaduri spent his life playing women in the village theatre. More recently, he has been performing the goddess of disease, Sitala Mata, who cures souls from both spiritual hauntings and ailments such as poxes and pustules. Recounting Bhaduri’s metamorphosis from man to goddess, Performing the Goddess explores what it meant for him to become a woman on a nightly basis, at the height of his career. Kishore’s film generated a new interest in men playing female roles at a time when global discourse regarding queer and gender identities was growing. For Bhaduri, performing gender was his life’s work, when being with his male lover was never a feasible reality. Under the Buggery Act, established during British rule on the Indian subcontinent (1858 to 1947) and in force until September 2018, homosexuality was a criminal act punishable by ten years of imprisonment. Comprising a video documentary and selection of photos shot on set, Naveen Kishore’s Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri’s Story is featured in Moving Still: Performative Photography in India (p. 56), a group exhibition that traces the trajectory of performative lens-based practices in India on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from April 19 to September 2, 2019. Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and an initiative of the Institute of Asian Art, and curated by Diana Freundl.

Naveen Kishore, Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri's Story, 1999, inkjet print, Courtesy of the artist

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


3.

Olympic Village Station

IN TRANSIT

Arts Umbrella Photography Students

Curated by Roxanne Gagnon, Alex Waber, and Kristen Roos, Arts Umbrella

In transit (2019) demonstrates the work of Arts Umbrella students working through the theme “reflections.” The installation features both darkroom and digital photography practices created by two classes of students aged 13 to 19 during the fall session at Arts Umbrella. Students worked to interrupt the theme and unpack how darkroom and digital photography intersect and complement each other. For this project, student artists Maria Varbanova, Tyrese Temple, Alex Sikorsky, Bali Chu-Mehrer, Diego Minor, and Jackie Franks were instructed by teachers Kristen Roos and Alex Waber. See also the accompanying exhibition In transit: Reflections at Remington Gallery, April 6–15 (p. 136).

Arts Umbrella Photography Students, In transit, 2019, installation mock-up

Public Art

30 – 31


4.

Broadway–City Hall Station

LACUNA

Birthe Piontek

Curated by Kate Bellringer, Burrard Arts Foundation

In Lacuna (2018), Birthe Piontek investigates how photography and the human body are connected, with a special interest in the female body and its representation in our society. “Lacuna,” a Latin word, means an unfilled space, gap, or cavity, especially in bone. Piontek is interested in the fact that neither image nor body can ever represent a totality: the image always shows only a part and so does the body, as it conceals the thoughts and the inner life of its individual. The body never seems to be whole or complete, since it is subject to constant change and the processes of aging.

Birthe Piontek launches her new artist book Abendlied and speaks with curator Kimberly Phillips as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 30 at 5:30 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 113).

In this project, vintage press photos and portraits of women from the 1950s and ’60s are partially cut, set up in three-dimensional collages, merged with other materials such as fabric, fur, and hair, and then photographed. Piontek is interested in how the body and photographic image not only influence each other but also share certain traits: they both act as canvases for our projections and are inherently transformable objects. Through this intervention, Piontek emphasizes the images’ incompleteness. The faces of the depicted women are cut out, and what remains is only a figure, an outline, or a reference to a photographic image and the person it depicted. When the individuality of the image is dissolved, it becomes universal: a faceless surface onto which we can project and through which we can question our preformed ideas of body image, femininity, and gender roles.

Birthe Piontek, Lacuna, 2018

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


5.

King Edward Station

ANTHROPOCENE; THE PRESENT I

Desirée Patterson

Georgia Straight and Capture Canada Line Competition Station

Each composition of Anthropocene; The Present I was created to reveal the destructive presence of humans, suggesting the disappearance and decay of the natural world. The artist’s process for this series consisted of digital image capture of industrialized landscapes, which she photographed both locally and globally, followed by the meticulous digital manipulation of form, shape, and orientation. The focal points within each artwork portray the potentially cataclysmic modern world, from the urbanization of our species and the rise of fossil fuels to industrialization, consumerism, deforestation, and energy consumption. These circular configurations spiral into themselves, symbolizing introspection and the infinite cycle of creation and destruction. Although the earth has witnessed geological rebirths, it has never been faced with this type of crisis. Our species alone is responsible for the ominous changes that we have inflicted upon our planet, and as highly conscious beings, we are unique in our awareness of our own culpability. This series aspires to incite each individual to action in the shaping of our collective future by way of influencing awareness and sharing solutions. Four entries to the Canada Line Competition were shortlisted by jury, and the winning photographs, by Desirée Patterson, were determined by public vote on the Georgia Straight’s website.

Desirée Patterson, Anthropocene; The Present l, 2019

Public Art

32 – 33


6.

Lansdowne Station

THE SOLARIUM (H+A)

Adad Hannah

Curated by Shaun Dacey, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program

The Solarium (H+A) (2019) uses a system of custommade mirrors and metal armatures to augment and interrupt the usual experience of photographic portraiture. The mirrors reveal alternative angles within the frame as well as objects outside of the frame while simultaneously blocking areas that would normally be visible. Shot in the Richmond home of the couple pictured, The Solarium (H+A) is a continuation of Adad Hannah’s interest in the history, mechanics, and technology of photography, highlighting the veracity and performativity within the photographic image. For over a decade, Hannah has been exploring historically trenchant themes through elaborate bodies of work that include installation, video, and photography. Inspired by the historical practice of tableaux vivants (translated as “living pictures”), Hannah’s work invokes the durational form of early cinema while referencing the history of photography, often through reinterpretations of art historical moments.

Adad Hannah, The Solarium (H+A), 2019

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


7.

Richmond–Brighouse Station

FRASER RIVER FAMILIES

Diamond Point

Curated by Paula Booker, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program

In Musqueam culture, salmon is sacred. They are a symbol of abundance, prosperity, and wealth. They are our livelihood. We have the responsibility to respect all things, which includes protecting our salmon populations. A continued decline in their numbers would be devastating for our people. It is accepted among the Coast Salish Nations that the Musqueam were the sentinels of the river and protectors of the great resources of the estuary. Fishing season in Musqueam is a family affair. For Fraser River Families, I reached out to family and Musqueam community members for images of fishing on the river. In many of these photos, you’ll find my grandfather, Robert Point. He was the backbone of our family. Our culture was very important to him, and he always shared his knowledge and teachings with all of his children and grandchildren. As a young Musqueam person, it has been interesting to learn some of my family history and our connection to what is now called Richmond. Many Musqueam people were responsible for overseeing points of land here, such as Point Roberts, Garry Point, and Point Grey, and so the legend is that Catholic priests gave these people the surname Point. This history is incredibly important, because it connects me not only with my ancestors but also this place. As a community and First Nation, Musqueam has always practiced strong and proud traditions. We have lived in our Traditional Territory and fished salmon from the Fraser River since time immemorial. This knowledge continues to be passed on through families to our future generations. Many nonIndigenous residents of Richmond are unaware of our history here. It is important for others to know that this city sits on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam people. — Diamond Point

A panel of Indigenous artists selected Diamond Point to be the featured artist for this station from an open call for a Musqueam artist. Point produced the work through an intensive mentorship with artist Krista Belle Stewart.

Diamond Point, Fraser River Families, 2019

Public Art

34 – 35


W-E-L-C-O-M-E TO POCO Evann Siebens

April 2019–May 2020

Sited on 250 street banners throughout Port Coquitlam Presented by City of Port Coquitlam’s Street Banner Program

Evann Siebens’s W-E-L-C-O-M-E to PoCo (2019), produced for the City of Port Coquitlam’s Street Banner Program, is a public art project installed on 250 street banners hung in civic squares, major city throughways, and various neighbourhoods of the city. W-E-L-C-O-M-E to PoCo seeks to communicate place and belonging through welcoming gestures and by highlighting the cultural diversity and natural landmarks of PoCo. The project consists of a total of fourteen diptychs. Half of the diptychs picture residents of diverse ages and cultural backgrounds. Capturing the cultural and demographic diversity of PoCo, these images speak to the makeup of the community and tell people’s stories. Each person on the street banner gestures “welcome” by spelling out one letter of the word in American Sign Language. The word is also written in English and the person’s native language. On the other side of the diptych is a close-up shot of the hand gesture together with the letter it represents. The banners fit together like a puzzle, spelling the word W-E-L-C-O-M-E as one travels down the street or views them in civic squares and parking lots. The other seven images take the same individuals but place them into a PoCo landscape as silhouettes, where the figure (along with their gesture) is cut out of the landscape, leaving white or brightly coloured negative space. Featuring highly recognizable PoCo landmarks and sites, these images speak to the community’s distinct relationship to the natural world and urban landscapes around them and the histories inscribed in place. The City of Port Coquitlam’s Street Banner Program invites artists to propose a public artwork that reflects, contemplates, and highlights the community of Port Coquitlam: its people, natural beauty, defining features, and contexts. Street banners are installed for the duration of one year and are accompanied by an artist-led public workshop.

Evann Siebens, W-E-L-C-O-M-E to PoCo, 2019, installation mock-up

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019



This year’s Featured Exhibition Program features five of the top-rated participating exhibitions as decided upon by the 2019 exhibitions jury. With a mix of shows at galleries and artist-run centres, the 2019 Featured Exhibitions represent some of the most compelling and current lens-based art showcased in this year’s Festival.

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

a Handful of Dust Group Exhibition

The Polygon Gallery

An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance Kali Spitzer

grunt gallery

A Harlem Nocturne Deanna Bowen

Contemporary Art Gallery 555 Nelson St, Vancouver

p. 48–51

A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes Elizabeth Milton

VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver

p. 52–55

Moving Still: Performative Photography In India Group Exhibition

Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby St, Vancouver

p. 56–59

p. 40–43

101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver p. 44–47

350 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


1

1 Man Ray, Dust Breeding, 1920, SOCAN 2019, part of a Handful of Dust (p. 40)


On until April 28

The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver Tu–Su: 10 am–5 pm; M: closed Admission by donation

3

Group Exhibition

A HANDFUL OF DUST

2

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


4

Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23); but on that day in 1920, it was just a horizontal surface, covered in a thick layer of New York dust. Man Ray remembered: “Looking down on the work as I focused the camera, it appeared like some strange landscape from a bird’s-eye view.” Relocating to Paris, Man Ray brought the photograph with him. Surrealism, with its interest in the unconscious and the uncanny, was blooming. In October 1922, it was published in a little journal with a deliberately misleading caption: View from an aeroplane (much later it would be titled Dust Breeding). Seeing Earth from above is disorienting, but wartime aerial reconnaissance photographs had already become common currency in newspapers and magazines. Devastated cities have an unsettling beauty. Meanwhile, many avant-garde photographers were starting to shoot unexpected subject matter from new angles, attempting to revolutionize perception itself.

Curated by David Campany

2 Eva Stenram, Per Pulverem Ad Astra (detail), 2007, unique chromogenic prints, Courtesy of the artist 3 Eva Stenram, Per Pulverem Ad Astra (detail), 2007, unique chromogenic prints, Courtesy of the artist 4 John Divola, Vandalism portfolio (detail), 1974-75 (printed 1993), gelatin silver prints, Courtesy of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia Kennedy

I am a curator of exhibitions, and recently I was invited to put together my “dream show.” That’s a phrase to raise the eyebrow of any Freudian, but I took it seriously. What could such an exhibition be? A dream will defy the logic of time and space: things from an almost forgotten holiday combine with yesterday’s trip to the cinema. Moreover, there is often no obvious connection between what is dreamt and what it might mean. This is not unlike our initial responses to images. We intuit that an image cannot carry a message the way a truck carries coal, and so we are not held by rational thought. Why not begin an exhibition with such a photograph, an image so wide open it could mean almost anything, or nothing. A risky start. In 1920, the artist Man Ray was visiting his friend, Marcel Duchamp, in his studio on Broadway, in Manhattan. Man Ray was complaining to Duchamp that a rich collector wanted him to photograph her artworks. Duchamp suggested his own latest, unfinished artwork might be something upon which Man Ray could practice. Eventually, Duchamp’s piece would become known as The Bride Stripped Bare by

Featured Exhibitions

Also in October 1922, T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land. The great dreamlike poem of the interwar era picks over the rubble of Western civilization like a literary detective, stacking up quotations and allusions as fragments of evidence. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” warns Eliot. To many writers and artists of the 1920s, the ideal of a rational, stable order was looking more like a fantasy. What if The Waste Land and Man Ray’s photograph of dust, appearing that very same month, were harbingers of the ensuing century? This would be the theme of my exhibition. Any photographer will tell you that dust has a double-edged relation to the camera. It must be kept well away from the equipment, but it is deeply photogenic. Floating in the air, dust motes catch the light and settle on surfaces as a soft glow. There is also something universal about dust. We come from it, go to it, and create it daily with all the inevitability of breathing, and dying. So, an image of dust, even one as obscure as Man Ray’s, is likely to have all manner of resonances and associations. Some will be yours only, but many will be shared, from the epic scale of the aerial view and the abstract landscape to the close-up world of forensic imaging.

40 – 41


5 Jeff Mermelstein, Statue (‘Double Check’ by Seward Johnson), New York, 11 September 2001, 2001, C-print, Private Collection

Beyond these associations, many artists have explored the idea of dust as material and metaphor, with its allusions to time, mortality, and ruin. For example in the early 1970s, the Californian John Divola began breaking into disused houses, making mysterious, ritualistic interventions in the corners of rooms, and then photographing them. More recently, Eva Stenram placed under her bed colour negatives of images that NASA sent back from the surface of Mars. She allowed balls of dust to gather on them before making prints. The cosmic and the domestic implications of dust are conflated.

5

Even when images of dust are thoroughly earthbound, they can be otherworldly. Jeff Mermelstein, a street photographer in the classic mould, was out shooting in New York that September morning when the Twin Towers were struck. His shot of a public sculpture in a powdered avenue near Wall Street is both urgent and entirely dreamlike. He wrote: “I’m not a war photographer, so this wasn’t an easy experience for me. The constantly shattering glass was terrifying and distracting, and my camera kept getting completely covered in ash. But because for years I have been taking documentary pictures of New Yorkers out on the sidewalks, there is a way in which I was prepared.” In 1991, the French artist Sophie Ristelhueber visited the deserts of Kuwait. Allied forces had pushed Saddam Hussein’s invading army back into Iraq, and Ristelhueber wanted to see, for herself, the traces left behind: tanks, personal belongings, and long trenches dug into the sand. She photographed on foot and from the air, always looking down as if surveying the ground before her. The resulting series was titled Fait, meaning both “fact” and “done.” In a short text, Ristelhueber reveals her inspiration: “By shifting from the air to the ground, I sought to destroy any notion of scale as in Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s Dust Breeding.” In 2007, Ristelhueber printed one of these photographs as a single work, titled À cause de l’élevage de poussière (Because of the dust breeding). It is a striking image, and its genesis speaks volumes about the unpredictable effects that images can have upon us. An artist photographs a former war zone and her visual template is a peculiar, semi-abstract view of a half-finished artwork made seventy years earlier, on another continent. No logic can account for that. We don’t file images in our minds the way they are filed in an archive or searched for online. Words will not come close to accounting for the madness of images.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Featured Exhibitions

42 – 43


March 15–April 27

grunt gallery #116–350 East 2nd Ave, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su&M: closed

Kali Spitzer participates in a panel discussion on identity building in photography as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Tue. Apr. 23 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 113).

Opening Reception Thu, Mar 14, 7–9 pm

Kali Spitzer

AN EXPLORATION OF RESILIENCE AND RESISTANCE

Curated by Glenn Alteen 6

An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance is about identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love— these images are about resilience and resistance. In this series, Kali Spitzer uses tintype photography to capture her community of mostly Indigenous and mixed-heritage people, while challenging preconceived notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Tintype or ferrotype photography was a product of the mid 1800s and most popular during the US Civil War. The medium persisted into the twentieth century at fairs and carnivals as tourist photography, and more recently has been revived as novelty or art photography. Tintype was the first real populist form of photography, making photographs available to working-class people. It’s hard to look at tintypes now and not be thrust back into the colonial era, and many of Spitzer’s photographs look like they could have been shot at a rodeo or powwow, retaining that populist leaning. But the artist’s use of this type of photography that is so tied to the colonialist project to produce images of decolonialism and empowerment is subversive and strategic.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


NURTURING RESILIENCE: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF KALI SPITZER

Henri Robideau

7

I am arrested by Kali Spitzer’s photographs. I am stopped in my tracks, staring. Time need not hurry. A love vibe lives here. Good medicine. The richly toned faces in these tintypes have an edge of historical depth to them, as if they have emerged from the primordial days of photography, but with eyes speaking witness to contemporary lives. These photographs span the generations.

6 Kali Spitzer, Kiniaii, 2016, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″ 7 Kali Spitzer, Cora-Allen Wickliffe and Son Chaskewaste Twiss, 2018, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″

This body of work, titled An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance (2015–), addresses the multifaceted concerns of “identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love,” says Spitzer in her artist statement for her exhibition at grunt gallery. “I photograph my community of primarily Indigenous and mixedheritage people, challenging preconceived notions of race, gender, and sexuality,” Spitzer tells us, adding, “I’m showing who we are today, bringing light to our stories and creating a space for us to be seen and heard, defining ourselves, making it clear how we want to be represented.”

Featured Exhibitions

While the collective portfolio of the Resilience and Resistance photographs relates to community, the individual images focus on personal identity. Spitzer says, “Every photograph, every person, has a story to tell, and I am supporting them to tell these stories through their portrait. I believe that each image I take is a collaboration between the person I am photographing and myself. I wouldn’t be able to create the images I do without trust. This is an essential element of my work—giving a safe space for the individual to be seen, heard, and documented the way that they want to be represented.” In the gallery presentation, most of the portraits are accompanied by a recording of the sitter’s voice. These spoken words reinforce the tradition of oral history, with variations ranging from poetic expression to ancestral reflections. Spitzer explains, “The viewer is urged to look right at us and listen to our stories. I think that hearing somebody’s voice is really important, and a lot of people use their Indigenous language to introduce themselves.”

44 – 45


Henri Robideau is a photographer and cultural narrator who lives and works in Vancouver.

The interpersonal, “looking right at us” aspect of these tintypes is unavoidable. In most cases, the sitter’s eyes meet those of the viewer. “That is my preference,” says Spitzer, “and I have mixed feelings on this. But sometimes when people aren’t looking at the lens, the image could then be interpreted as objectifying. Because so much of my work is about being seen and being heard, there is a lot of value in staring straight into that person’s eyes.” The search for identity in these photographs begins with the photographer. Kali Spitzer is Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, BC) on her father’s side, and Jewish from Transylvania, Romania, on her mother’s. She spent her early childhood with both parents in Whitehorse and then Yellowknife, and after age six, with her mother in Victoria. She says, “I’m very linked to both of my parents, and feel strongly that people also include that I’m Jewish, because I often find they only want to hear about the fact that I’m Kaska Dena, and I have to go chasing them saying no, you’ve only got half my lineage. I visited the North a few times with my mother when I was younger, but started going back up by myself when I was nineteen. I’d say that’s when I got to spend a lot of time with my family and get to know everyone in that context of my life. That’s when I started documenting my people, which is another huge part of my work that I feel passionately about.” The people represented in Spitzer’s portraits are drawn from her community of family, friends, fellow students, and artist colleagues. “My community is diverse and includes Indigenous people who grew up immersed in their culture, knowing exactly who they are and where they come from,” she explains. “It also includes Indigenous people who grew up away from their land and their community for many different reasons, including the effects of colonization, residential schools, and lateral violence. Many of our parents were stolen at a young age, ripped away from their land and placed in the horrendous institution of residential schools, which has created a huge gap in passing down our cultures.” Rebuilding, reconnecting, and nurturing resilience are ideas imbedded in Kali Spitzer’s photography: “Too often, Indigenous women and non-binary communities are not heard or seen in the way we define and experience ourselves in society. I am working to redress this by creating images of contemporary Indigenous people from an Indigenous perspective.”

and Resistance series, a head and shoulders portrait of Chemehuevi artist and photographer Cara Romero radiates an organic timeless glow, drawing the viewer into the well of dark eyes, while the audio track’s poetic narrative told by Romero’s soft voice weaves together life’s experiences, a people’s existence, nature’s perpetual cycle, the eternity of the land, and love for lives created. One cannot escape unmoved from this work. 8

The surface of Spitzer’s portraits have a rough-hewn, swirling fluidity, which results from the tintype’s handapplied wet collodion emulsion, an elaborate process that dominated the early days of photography, from about 1850 to 1880, and has recently seen a revival. One of its key characteristics is the orthochromatic rendering or disproportionate darkening of warmer skin tones. Spitzer’s use of this anachronistic technique imbues her work with an ambiance of history, a wonderful harmonic to the audio narratives of people telling their generational stories. Because the tintype must be developed immediately after being exposed, there is an element of instant gratification where both collaborators—the photographer and the sitter—see the result at the same time. This can be a shocking revelation: “I have that reaction, too, with tintypes. Also, the harsh lighting they require accentuates wrinkles, and sometimes people are taken aback at first. But then a minute later, they actually really love it, and that’s a beautiful moment. I want people to feel empowered and good about themselves when they look at their image, that’s the part I love the most.”

Spitzer achieves this with great beauty, honesty, and empathy. Citing just one example from the Resilience

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

8 Kali Spitzer, Cara Romero, 2016, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″ 9 Kali Spitzer, Holland Andrews, 2018, digital scan of tintype, archival C-print, 30″ × 40″

2019


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Featured Exhibitions

46 – 47


April 5–June 16

Contemporary Art Gallery 555 Nelson St, Vancouver Tu–Su: 12–6 PM; M: closed

Deanna Bowen delivers an artist talk as part of the Capture Speaker Series on Wed. Apr. 3 at 6 pm at Inform Interiors (see p. 112), followed by the 2019 Festival Launch at 7 pm (see p. 124).

Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 7–9 pm

Deanna Bowen

A HARLEM NOCTURNE 10 Deanna Bowen, Choo Choo Williams at the Harlem Nocturne, 2019, vinyl print on billboard (offsite at Fraser and Kingsway), Courtesy of the artist and Lovena Fox 10

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


“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.

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,

Featured Exhibitions

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

48 – 49


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

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,

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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

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

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.

2019


12 Deanna Bowen, Gibson Notations 2, 2019, transparency in lightbox, 50.7″ × 28.25″, Courtesy of the artist

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)

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

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.

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Featured Exhibitions

50 – 51


April 18, 7:30 pm

(one night event)

VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver

Elizabeth Milton

A GUIDED MEDITATION WITH VHS EYELASHES One night only! April 18, 7:30 pm

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.

All images: Elizabeth Milton, A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes, performance documentation, 2018

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.

Photos by Richard Clark, Fran Tirpak, and Sydney Southam

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

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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).

CHANNELLING THE LIGHT: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH VHS

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

Feature Exhibitions

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.

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.

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.

“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?”

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“It was the white light. The liquid mercury of the white light changed me. It set me floating. I became weightless.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

From here I continued to sit, absorbed in the light.

“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.”

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Feature Exhibitions

54 – 55


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

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).

Admission: $6.50 (child)–$24 (adult)

Group Exhibition

MOVING STILL: PERFORMATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY IN INDIA

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CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

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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. 14

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.

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

Featured Exhibitions

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.

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

56 – 57


15

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15 Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Sisters in bed, c. 1932, modern silver gelatin print with selenium toning, Courtesy of PHOTOINK

Featured Exhibitions

58 – 59


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

Strata of Many Truths Roxanne Charles

p. 62

Acts of Looking: At the Intersection of Photography and Medicine Sara K. MacLellan

p. 64

Framing Dundee: An Interview with Hua Jin Brit Bachmann

p. 68

TD Curator Highlights

p. 70

Far Below and Far Away Denise Ryner

p. 160

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17

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


STRATA OF MANY TRUTHS

Roxanne Charles

Fragments of the truth are everywhere. There are many truths. Layers of many truths. Strata.

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.

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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.

Roxanne Charles of Semiahmoo First Nation is a cultural historian employing means of visual representation, oral history, and ceremony.

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

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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.

Articles

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

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.

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.

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.

Sara K. MacLellan is an art historian, writer, and artist-maker based in Port Moody, BC.

Celebrated Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog—best known for his mid twentieth-century street photography using Kodachrome

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

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20

20 Photograph of Augustine (“Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture”), planche XXX, from Bourneville et Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1878), Wellcome Collection (CCBY-4.0)

Articles

64 – 65


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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

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22

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).

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.

21 & 22 Theodore Wan, Basic Surgical Positions, 1977, 2 of 11 silver gelatin prints, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund

Articles

66 – 67


FRAMING DUNDEE: AN INTERVIEW WITH HUA JIN

Hua Jin and Brit Bachmann

BB What has your experience been as an artist in Montreal?

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.

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?

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Brit Bachmann is a writer and artist based in Vancouver.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


23 Hua Jin, William Fraser and Grandfather, from the series Dundee, 2017–,.inkjet print

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.

Articles

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.

68 – 69


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.

Stuart Keeler Senior Art Curator, TD Bank Group

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. 1

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.

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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

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


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) 2

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TD Curator Highlights

70 – 71


CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Fred Herzog, Man with Cane, 1961, archival pigment print, 12″ × 18″, Courtesy of Equinox Gallery, Vancouver

72 – 73


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.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2019 Jury Emmy Lee Wall Assistant Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery Denise Ryner Director/Curator, Or Gallery Carol Sawyer Artist

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


On until May 5

CRASH PAD AND TRUCKER BOMBS Cindy Baker

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

Curated by Adrienne Fast 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″

Selected Exhibitions

74 – 75


(IN) SITE

On until May 5

Stephanie Patsula

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

Curated by Adrienne Fast (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

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


On until April 20

THE DECAMERON RETOLD Adad Hannah

Richmond Art Gallery 7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond M–F: 10 am–6 pm Sa&Su: 10 am–5 pm

Curated by Nan Capogna 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.

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.

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.

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.

Adad Hannah, The Decameron Retold (after Il Decamerone, Falkman), 2019, Courtesy of Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal

Selected Exhibitions

76 – 77


FACES OF SURVIVAL

On until June 30

Marissa Roth

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)

Curated by Nina Krieger and Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar 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.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Marissa Roth, Leon Kahn, 2018, b/w matted, framed, archival silver gelatin print, 20″ × 24″, Copyright Marissa Roth

2019


On until April 29

FINDING MY FATHER AT YONGPYONG Taehoon Kim

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

Curated by North Van Arts 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.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

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″

Selected Exhibitions

78 – 79


On until April 28

LIQUID LANDSCAPES Nicolas Sassoon

Surrey Art Gallery UrbanScreen 13458 107A Ave, Surrey M–Su: 30 min. after sunset until midnight

Curated by Rhys Edwards 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.

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.

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

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Nicolas Sassoon, Serpentine River, still from Liquid Landscapes animation, 2018, digital animation installation view, image Courtesy of SITE Photography

2019


On until April 13

FOUND/HELD Group Exhibition

Access Gallery 222 E Georgia St, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su&M: closed

Curated by Katie Belcher 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).

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.

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. Ursula Handleigh, I can feel you forgetting, 2017, steel, rust, and breath, Courtesy of the artist

Through animated iron-filing videos, Bartol reimagines dowsing (also known as water-witching) as a technology for remediation of contaminated land.

Selected Exhibitions

80 – 81


On until April 21

WHERE THE HOUR FLOATS Amalie Atkins

Art Gallery at Evergreen 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam W–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su: 12–4 pm; M&Tu: closed

Curated by Katherine Dennis 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.

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.

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

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

Amalie Atkins, The Summoning, 2013, chromogenic print, 40″ × 50″, Courtesy of the artist

2019


March 15–April 20

THE BOX PROJECT Ryan Quast

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

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–

Selected Exhibitions

82 – 83


THESE WALLS

March 15–April 21

Lynne Cohen

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

Curated by Jennifer Cane 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.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Lynne Cohen, Laboratory, 1999, dye coupler printed, 43.5″ × 50.5″ , Courtesy of the estate of Lynne Cohen and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto

2019


March 20–May 11

ALTERED STATES Jim Breukelman

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

Curated by Darrin Morrison 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.

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

In this exhibition, Breukelman revisits the diner series once again, installed alongside three, more recent

Selected Exhibitions

84 – 85


ENCOUNTERS

March 29–April 14

Josema Zamorano

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

Curated by Annie Briard 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

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Josema Zamorano, Encounters #3,2018, pigment inkjet print on watercolour cotton rag, 17″ × 24.5″

2019


March 29–May 10

ROME Mike Grill

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

Presented by Patron Art House and Fine Art Framing & Services 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.

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.

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

Mike Grill, A Pair of Nuns, 2018, silver gelatin print mounted on stretched canvas with acrylic border, 38.5″ × 48.5″

Selected Exhibitions

86 – 87


April 1–26

NPAC NATIONAL PICTURES OF THE YEAR NOMINEES Group Exhibition

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

Curated by Ali Ledgerwood and Ric Ernst 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.

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).

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

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. Chris Donovan for MacLean's magazine, 2018.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


April 1–29

NIGHTCRAWL

Charles Clark Gallery

Dane Murner

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

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″

Selected Exhibitions

88 – 89


April 3–17

THE SPACE OUT OF TIME Julie F Hill

Terminal Creek Contemporary 569 Artisan Lane, Bowen Island F–Su: 12–4 pm; M–Th: closed Opening Reception Sat, Apr 13, 12–4 pm

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.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Julie F Hill, Mirror Darkness, 2017, installation view at Lumen Studios, London

2019


April 4–May 5

UNEARTHING, FOLDING, AND BURNING Torrie Groening Ryan Peter Gerri York

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

Curated by Justin Muir 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.

Selected Exhibitions

Gerri York, Crane 1, 2018, photogram, 24″ × 24″

90 – 91


April 4–May 9

PATISSERIE DUCHAMP Christos Dikeakos

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

Curated by Brad Chernoff and Karen Kolenda 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.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Christos Dikeakos, “Patteasserie” Duchamp après que, Nude Descending a Staircase No 1, 1970–2009, inkjet photo collage, 16″ × 20″

2019


April 4–May 4

TOKYO–YOKOSUKA 1976–1983 Greg Girard

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,

Monte Clark Gallery 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 10 am–5:30 pm Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 6–8 pm

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

Selected Exhibitions

92 – 93


A FIRMAMENT

April 4–May 11

Blaine Campbell

Republic Gallery 732 Richards St, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 10 am–5 pm; Su&M: closed Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 7–9 pm

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.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Blaine Campbell, Light Study 20 (In progress), 2018, giclée on dibond, 82″ × 102″

2019


April 4–28

LOOPDALOOP Iris Film Collective

Burrard View Fieldhouse 545 North Slocan St, Vancouver M–Su: 7–9 pm Opening Reception Thu, Apr 4, 7–9 pm

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.

Participating artists are Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty, Zoe Kirk-Gushowaty, Alex MacKenzie, Lisa g Nielsen, Nisha Platzer, Sydney Southam, Amanda Thomson, and Ryder White.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

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.

Iris Film Collective, stills from LOOPDALOOP, 2019, 16 mm film

Selected Exhibitions

94 – 95


April 5–21

THE STRATA OF MANY TRUTHS

Museum of Vancouver

Roxanne Charles

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

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)

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Generously supported by a City of Vancouver Creative City Strategic Grant.

Roxanne Charles, Truth, 2011

2019


April 6–May 11

PRIMARY COLOUR Group Exhibition

Equinox Gallery 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 10 am–5 pm; Su&M: closed Opening Reception Sat, Apr 6, 2–4 pm

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

Selected Exhibitions

96 – 97


April 6–28

STILL LIVES EXTREME Dana Hawkes

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

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″

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


April 6–May 11

DUNDEE Hua Jin

Viridian Gallery 1570 Coal Harbour Quay, Vancouver M–Sa: 11 am–5 pm; Su: closed Opening Reception Sat, Apr 6, 2–5 pm

Dundee is a rural township located in the southwestern corner of the Montérégie region of Quebec. Scots settlers arrived and settled in this region in about 1800, giving this place a name from their homeland: Dundee. This project focuses on the evolution of Dundee, Quebec, in relation to the stories of Scottish migrations. Montreal-based artist Hua Jin documented Dundee in photographs, capturing its landscapes, residents, and their living conditions, with an emphasis on historical and cultural connections with Scottish migrations. The research component focuses on historical archives and found objects from both culture and nature, including family albums, letters, notes, drawings, and maps as well as rocks and wood. Juxtaposing photographs with research materials and found objects, Jin has assembled a range of media from different historical periods with the aim of bridging the past with the present and creating montages about Dundee in order to represent stories of Scottish immigration.

This first stage of the project triggered a great interest in the “original” Dundee in Scotland. So, in 2017 and 2018, Jin and Dr. William Fraser visited Scotland with the purpose of tracing Fraser’s family roots. During these trips, they discovered the ruins of the traditional stone dwelling where Fraser’s great-great-grandmother was born in 1806 and the churchyard where his great-great-grandfather is buried. The significance of returning to the origin and its accompanying emotions have profoundly enhanced the project. The juxtaposition of Jin’s photographs and found objects from various places in these two Dundees deepens this project into multiple layers. The spans of time and geographic distances traversed by the project provide insights about what has changed and what remains the same within Scottish culture. Jin’s Dundee addresses questions regarding how the history of migration shapes our culture, identity, and way of living.

Selected Exhibitions

This project was generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ).

Hua Jin, Dundee, 2017–, inkjet prints, historical archives, found objects

98 – 99


April 7–21

BERLIN PROJECT II 1945–2018 Barrie Jones

Lights Out Space Oak Street Studios 8930 Oak St, Vancouver M–Su: 12–5 pm Opening Reception Sun, April 7, 4–8 pm

Berlin Project II 1945–2018 presents a series of smalland medium-scale photographs of the facades of structures and buildings in contemporary Berlin. The images show sections of neoclassic pillars, pediments, and walls with bullet holes and shrapnel damage from the battle for the city in 1945, which have been meticulously restored, carelessly patched, or left untouched and weathered. The surfaces’ condition of repair or neglect reflects a post-war period of changing economies and bluntly imposed political priorities. Although ubiquitous in most public areas, these bullet holes go mostly unnoticed and have become part of the patina of the urban landscape. The images simultaneously function as stable records of a specific violent social history while also being abstracted, minimalist images of grids, varied textures, and subtle colours. They are formalist and architectural, walls on walls: compressing space, ignoring time, disassociated from their environment and context.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Barrie Jones, Berlin Project II 1945–2018, 2016–18, inkjet on paper, 14″ × 22″

2019


April 11–May 4

SHADOW ARCHITECTURE Michael Love

Franc Gallery 1654 Franklin St, Vancouver Sa&Su: 12–6 pm; M–F by appt ron@francgallery.com Opening Reception Thu, Apr 11, 6–9 pm

The works of Shadow Architecture re-examine the architecture and military legacy of the Cold War period by using the photographic archive as material for production. The photographs, sourced from the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, document the United States’ emergence as a world superpower through a representation of militarized sites, including missile launch sites, weapons testing facilities, radar stations, and arms manufacturing sites.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

The exhibition works through the collection and rearrangement of selected photographs from this archive. Using hand-cut collage, assemblage, and rephotography techniques, Vancouver-based artist Michael Love draws complex connections between the militarized sites, their histories, and their embedded ideologies. The resulting restructured architectural spaces act as propositions that reimagine physical and ideological spaces.

Michael Love, Architectural Study #8, 2018, inkjet print, 20″ × 30″

Selected Exhibitions

100 – 101


WHAT IT IS

April 12–14

Dan Jackson

Studio 730 730 Richards St, Vancouver Sa&Su: 10 am–6 pm Opening Reception Fri, Apr 12, 7 pm–midnight

Curated by Alia Tracy Complications from eye surgeries and corrective lenses to alleviate a condition known as strabismus have misaligned the speed at which artist Dan Jackson perceives colour frequencies. This brain-eye disconnect has resulted in an overcorrected sense of three-dimensional space. Prompted by these side effects, Jackson set out to explore how colour informs and transforms objects and space. In his new series What It Is (2019), Jackson applies frenetic, celebratory colour to photos of largely monochromatic industrial spaces to strip away their context and understood purpose. Though there were options for mechanizing the production of these images, Jackson chose instead to painstakingly hand trace and digitally colour each object, enabling human consciousness to intervene in the manufacturing process.

Transforming these utilitarian environments into surreal landscapes, Jackson offers a fictional, decorative world where multiple colour frequencies and fragments of time are presented simultaneously.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

The large-scale, detailed photos encourage the viewer to engage with the work up close. But doing so becomes an act of entropy, where viewers themselves initiate their collapse into disorder. What It Is offers a fresh, philosophical, and interpretive use of colour that blurs the line between representation and abstraction and challenges the perception of photography as a system of documentation.

Dan Jackson, Not It, 2018, archival pigment print, 36″ × 36″

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


April 14–May 5

HANDS ON–A HANDCRAFTED HUMAN MOSAIC Paolo Rubini

VIFF Vancity Theatre 1181 Seymour St, Vancouver M–Su: from 6 pm (+ when films are on) Opening Reception Sun, April 14, 6–8 pm

Travelling the world with increasing ease is a privilege of our time. Witnessing what makes us similar as humans despite our geographical, economic, and cultural differences is a byproduct of such a power. Paolo Rubini’s aim as a photographer is to try and capture the soul of a place by investigating its people and how they operate in and relate with their environment. In what ways do we, as humans, physically impact our surroundings the most? What makes us all part of the human family in our appearance and physical ability to express ourselves, and yet mark the differences in the statuses we hold, the jobs we do, the cultures we belong to, and the actions we take? What can specific parts of our bodies tell us about ourselves and human nature in different environments? The series’ theme, “hands on,” was born with such a vision and intention to answer these questions.

With a character of reportage and an aesthetic based on environmental portraiture and classic composition, the photographs of HANDS ON attempt to tell the story of our human condition, by focusing on one of the most common aspects shared by humankind. HANDS ON was put together as a mosaic assembling information gathered from fifteen countries across four continents over two years. It is an ongoing series informed by a love for people and our diversity that can shed a curious and tender light on what make us each unique.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

Paulo Rubini, On the other side (Annapurna panorama trek, Nepal), 2018, giclée photo metallic print, 36″ × 36″

Selected Exhibitions

102 – 103


April 18–May 11

APPARENT MOTIONS James Nizam

Gallery Jones Unit 1-258 E 1st Ave, Vancouver Tu–F: 11 am–6 pm; Sa: 12–5 pm & by appt; Su&M: closed Opening Reception Thu, Apr 18, 5–9 pm

Apparent Motions explores the movement of celestial objects such as the moon, sun, and stars through a constellation of photographs, sculptures, drawings, and sound media. The exhibition continues James Nizam’s interest in observing, mapping, measuring, calculating, and capturing astronomical measures of space and time through works that simultaneously confound and elucidate the modes of their production and display. Although “the astronomical” is the ostensible content of the exhibition, the artist explores the intricacies of the cosmos as a poetic framework for understanding human processes of spatial thinking, reasoning, imagination, and visualization. In this way, these works invite viewers to consider the appearance and materialization of space as they move between the acts of thought, perception, and embodiment. Among the exhibited works is the photographic series Drawings with Starlight (2018), for which Nizam constructed a camera that allows him to draw with the light of the stars, casting time, space, and

motion into spirographic patterns of extruded light. The related drawing series Field Transcripts (2019) presents an interpretation of Nizam’s fieldnotes as schematic drawings that illustrate the visual code and instructions used to generate the photographs that compose Drawings with Starlight. Alongside this, the installation Earth Spin Moon Orbit (2019) uses an astronomical tool called an equatorial mount to map the positional relationship between the moon and the gallery itself. Visualized through a moving laser pointer, we appear to be witnessing the orbital motion of the moon; however, it is in fact the earth’s counterclockwise rotation on its axis that we are observing. Simply put, the laser projection is a fixed point in space, and it is the architecture of the gallery that we are witnessing in motion. The audio piece Score (2017), sculpture Disc (2017), and photograph Heliographic Scale (2017) take three divergent approaches to interpreting the same material— starlight—and continue the perpetual cycle of data and exchange with the cosmos.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

James Nizam, Drawing with Starlight, 2018, lightjet print, 60″ × 48″

2019


April 25–May 19

GREEN GLASS DOOR Graeme Wahn Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Noah Friebel Theo Terry

Trapp Projects 274 E 1st Ave, Vancouver (entrance in laneway) Sa: 10–5 & by appt (info@trappeditions.com) Opening Reception Thu. April 25, 7–9 pm

Curated by Patrik Andersson Green Glass Door is situated within photographic histories, popular image spheres, and interior decoration. Set in a basement suite, the exhibition uses the space to engage installation practices by which the works must negotiate their domestic context.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

Trading in the kitsch and banal, the imagery deals with the semiotics of domestic images and their relation to broader contemporary visual culture. Green Glass Door attempts to develop a vocabulary of slang, abbreviating artistic strategies such as pop art and tableaux photography. Condensing categories of still life, commercial photography, Tumblr pages, and Instagram Stories, the works in the exhibition set the home as a site of image production, consumption, and distribution—fashioning an everyday environment in which the viewer is inundated with pictures. Graeme Wahn, Festation, 2017, pigment print in custom frame

Selected Exhibitions

104 – 105


April 27–June 8

SUBARCTIC PHASE Karen Zalamea

Access Gallery 222 E Georgia St, Vancouver Tu–Sa: 12–5 pm; Su&M: closed Opening Reception Fri, Apr 26, 7–9 pm

Curated by Katie Belcher In keeping with the ephemeral nature of the photographic process, Karen Zalamea used a handcrafted 4×5 camera and lenses fashioned out of ice to produce her newest series of photographs, They are lost as soon as they are made (2015–). Working in collaboration with technicians to fabricate lens moulds, she used these moulds to freeze local water while in Reykjavík, Iceland. The work explores the possibilities of deconstructing the mechanics of image-making and of capturing the natural landscape with elements of nature itself.

Karen Zalamea, They are lost as soon as they are made, 2017, archival giclée print

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019





The Events Program includes events designed by Capture as well as participating events submitted by galleries, artists, and other groups, from workshops to artist talks and film screenings to gallery hops. This section is organized by category. Please see the Calendar (p. 152) for chronological listings. Dates and times are subject to change. For the most up-to-date information, please visit capturephotofest.com.

Emilija Ĺ karnulytÄ—, Sirenomelia (film still), 2017


Events

CAPTURE SPEAKER SERIES 112 – 113

TALKS 114 – 116

TOURS 118 – 119

SCREENINGS & BROADCASTS 120 – 123

COMMUNITY EVENTS 124 – 127

WORKSHOPS 128 – 129


CAPTURE SPEAKER SERIES Presented in partnership with Inform Interiors

Wed. April 3 doors: 5:30 pm, talk 6 pm

Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver

Notes on A Harlem Nocturne Deanna Bowen FREE but ticketed via Eventbrite To book visit capturephotofest.com/events In relation to her solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Gallery (p. 48), artist Deanna Bowen contemplates the role of the photograph in her practice, excavating histories of Black experience in Canada and the US through the vehicle of her own family’s past. Reflecting specifically upon the new body of work that forms a focus of her exhibition, Bowen considers the simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of Black bodies in the archive, Vancouver’s particular performance of racism through class, and how her own work might offer a counterpoint to established forms of representation in Vancouver and their role in the continued erasure of Black presence from the city’s historical narratives. Followed by the 2019 Festival Launch (see p. 124). Presented in partnership with CAG.

Tue. Apr 9 reception 5 pm, talk 6 pm

Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver

Signals in the Sea Jayne Wilkinson FREE but ticketed via Eventbrite To book visit capturephotofest.com/events

Pushpamala N, Sunhere Sapne (Golden Dreams), 1998, hand-tinted black and white photograph, Shumita and Arani Bose Collection, NY

The ocean’s paradox is that it’s both an imagined and a technological space, full of myths and metaphors alongside data streams and extraction infrastructure. In this talk, curator Jayne Wilkinson discusses Signals in the Sea (p. 22), the 2019 Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project, featuring works by Christina Battle, Eshrat Erfanian, and Susan Schuppli that consider the surfaces, depths, and virtual spaces of the ocean. Wilkinson discusses how these projects, and others, address the urgencies of the ocean by exploring the intersection of environmentalism with digital technologies of seeing and sensing.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Tue. Apr 16 reception 5 pm, talk 6 pm

Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver

Orthagonal Heart Lines Krista Belle Stewart in conversation with Tania Willard FREE but ticketed via Eventbrite To book visit capturephotofest.com/events Issues around Indigenous lands, resource extraction, and the “colonial grid” form the contextual backdrop of Krista Belle Stewart’s commission for the 2019 Dal Grauer Public Art Project, Earthbound Mnemonic (p. 14). In this discussion with curator and writer Tania Willard, the artist talks about her approach to creating a powerful and meaning-laden artwork for the facade of an electrical substation. They will also touch upon Stewart’s practice at large and her multidisciplinary approach to working with archival materials in a way that allows for intimacy, coincidence, and the meeting of histories across time.

Tue. Apr 23 reception 5 pm, talk 6 pm

Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver

Personality/Persona: Identity Building in Photography Carol Sawyer, Elizabeth Milton, and Kali Spitzer

Sat. Apr 27 3 pm

Vancouver Art Gallery Room 4East, 750 Hornby St

Pushpamala N Free with membership or gallery admission ($18–24) Born in Bangalore in 1956, Pushpamala N has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art.” In her sharp and witty work as a photo- and video-performance artist, sculptor, writer, curator, and provocateur, and in her collaborations with writers, theatre directors, and filmmakers, she seeks to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse. Registration recommended via vanartgallery.bc.ca. If this cost presents a barrier, please contact programming@capturephotofest.com Presented in partnership with Vancouver Art Gallery, Institute of Asian Art.

Tue. Apr 30 reception: 5 pm book signing: 5:30 pm talk 6: pm

Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver

Evening Song: Birthe Piontek in conversation with Kimberly Phillips Book launch for Abendlied FREE but ticketed via Eventbrite To book visit capturephotofest.com/events

FREE but ticketed via Eventbrite To book visit capturephotofest.com/events In an age of seemingly endless selfies and carefully crafted online personas, what role does photography play in authentic identity building? This panel discussion, moderated by Katherine Dennis, curator at the Art Gallery at Evergreen in Coquitlam, sees the artist-participants discuss approaches to (self-) portraiture, the role of costuming, the creation of alter egos, the editing of personal and cultural histories, and the position of the photographer in presenting not just their own identities but those of their subjects. Artists Carol Sawyer, Elizabeth Milton (p. 52), and Kali Spitzer (p. 44) each incorporate these issues into their artistic practices but through very different photographic approaches and mediums.

Following on from her recent residency at Burrard Arts Foundation, German-born, Vancouver-based artist Birthe Piontek discusses the evolution of her photography practice and her multidisciplinary explorations into sculpture and installation. Her work explores the relationship between memory and identity, particularly female identity and its representation in our society. In conversation with Kimberly Phillips, curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Piontek will discuss, among other projects, her current Canada Line installation, (p. 32) and her new artist’s book, Abendlied (Gnomic, 2019), which looks at notions of heritage and belonging and revolves around the loss of the artist’s childhood home and her mother due to her battle with dementia. Abendlied will be available for purchase at the event.

Events

112 – 113


TALKS Thu. April 4 6–8:30 pm

Massy Books 229 E Georgia St, Vancouver

Sat. April 6 2 pm

Republic Gallery 3rd Floor, 732 Richards St, Vancouver

Analogue Photography in a Digital Era

Blaine Campbell: Artist Talk

FREE

FREE

Digital camera technology has never been more advanced—and yet, analogue photography is in the midst of a commercial revival.

Alberta-based photographer Blaine Campbell discusses his current exhibition A Firmament (p. 94).

How is this medium creatively relevant today? And why is it an affordable and accessible alternative to using digital tools for image creation?

Sun. April 7 1–3 pm

Join panelists Nicole Langdon-Davies, Lauren Ray, and Alistair Henning (moderator) as they search for answers.

100 Braid St Art Studios & Gallery 200-100 Braid St, New Westminster

UnderExposed: Sunday Art Salon

Doors at 6 pm, panel at 6:30 pm. FREE but ticketed via Eventbrite Sat. April 6 1–3 pm

Museum of Vancouver 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver

There Is Truth Here: Panel Discussion FREE with museum admission ($17.25–$20.50)

In the early twentieth century, artists, writers, theatre people, and art dealers met to debate and discuss the arts at Le Bateau-Lavoir in Paris, the birthplace of what became the cubism movement. This Sunday Salon held during the UnderExposed: Launching a New Art Movement exhibition provides a similar lively atmosphere, as a panel of lens-based artists, academics, and gallery owners explore the cultural relevance of photography as a mature and respected creative art medium that is shaping the world. Cash bar and non-alcoholic beverages available.

A panel discussion with There Is Truth Here curators Andrea Walsh and Lorilee Wastasecoot, MOV’s Curator of Indigenous Collections and Engagement Sharon Fortney, and artist Roxanne Charles (see p. 96). The panelists will explore the challenges of curating difficult knowledge and the role of communities and (residential school) survivors in museums and exhibitions. They’ll also speak to questions around how intergenerational voices and lived experiences (survival) contribute to a process of reconciliation, as well as consider ways to understand Canada’s colonization of Indigenous Peoples and its relationship to current illegal First Nations land abuses.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Sat. April 13 2–3 pm

Deer Lake Gallery 6584 Deer Lake Ave, Burnaby

Sat. April 13 4–5 pm

TRANSITION on the Outskirts of Photography

The Playground 434 Columbia St, Vancouver

Andrew Legere: Anomalous Experience

FREE

Admission by donation

In this artist talk, Grant Withers, Burnaby Photographic Society member and accredited professional with the Professional Photographers of Canada, shares behind-the-scenes images and commentary on the creation of the exhibition TRANSITION by the Burnaby Photographic Society and insights into his multidisciplinary art practice. Witness a camera club’s foray into thematic art exhibitions and an artist’s quest to push photography out of its comfort zone.

Andrew Legere speaks about his current exhibition, Anomalous Experience, discusses his process from capture to print, and provides a brief history of his photography.

Sat. April 13 4–6 pm

Beaumont Studios 316 W 5th Ave, Vancouver

Sally Buck & Kent Lins: Artist Talks & Happy Hour FREE How is power made visible? How is it conveyed by artists current and historical? When do we see power embodied, enacted, and exchanged? Sally Buck and Kent Lins explore these questions in their artist talks and exhibition Power Structures. Lins delivers the talk “Energy Combines,” exploring his ongoing pursuit to bring dynamism to his photographs, and how this began forty years ago. In“Women in the Way,” Sally Buck talks about her lifelong interest in creating images of activists, and why she developed an exhibition featuring women aged fifty to eighty-five. Craft beer available for purchase.

Sun. April 14 4–5 pm

The Playground 434 Columbia St, Vancouver

Rodrigo Tomzhinsky (Tom) and Andrew Legere: Photographing People FREE Tom and Andrew Legere discuss why they choose to photograph people as well as their methods of abstraction in their photography practices, which are visually very different.

Thu. April 18 12:15–1 pm

Native Education College 285 E 5th Ave, Vancouver

Kali Spitzer: Artist Talk FREE Presented as part of the Spark Talks series produced by grunt gallery, which is currently hosting Kali Spitzer’s An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance (p. 44), a 2019 Featured Exhibition.

Events

114 – 115


TALKS Sat. April 20 3 pm

Room 4East, Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby St, Vancouver

Sat. April 27 3:30 pm

Diana Freundl and Gayatri Sinha: Curators in Conversation Free for Vancouver Art Gallery members or with gallery admission ($18–$24) Registration recommended via vanartgallery.bc.ca Join this conversation between co-curators Diana Freundl, Associate Curator, Asian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Gayatri Sinha, Guest Curator, of the exhibition Moving Still: Performative Photography in India (p. 56).

Thu. April 25 6–7:30 pm

Beau Photo Supplies 1401 W 8th Ave, Vancouver

Art! Vancouver, Ballroom B, Vancouver Convention Centre East 999 Canada Place, Vancouver

Drone Photography Free with Art! Vancouver admission ($15) Purchase online via Eventbrite or at the door Exhibiting artists at Art! Vancouver, a four-day international art fair, discuss the impact drone technology has had on photography.

Sun. April 28 2–5 pm

ARC Gallery 1701 Powell St, Vancouver

Manifestations: Artist Talks FREE

The Adventures of Travel FREE Albert Normandin is an advertising, corporate, and industrial photographer with more than thirty years of experience in a business that has supported his passion and dedication to his personal work. In this talk, Normandin discusses images taken during his travels to some of the more remote parts of the world, including his latest addiction, Myanmar (Burma), which he has visited fifteen times.

Fri. April 26 11:30 am–2 pm

Join the artists of the Manifestations: Regarding Ephemera of the Contra-textual exhibition for a panel discussion between Janet Sadel, Karen Moe, and Gloria Edith Hole and a slideshow by Rena Del Pieve Gobbi. Enter through door to the right of the main entrance. Also join the closing party on Sat. April 27, 7–10 pm, with art, music, and a silent auction

Sun. April 28 The Polygon Gallery 3 pm 101 Carrie Cates Ct, North Vancouver

Nana Home Gallery 1685 W 13th Ave, Vancouver

7,7lb: Artist Talk FREE Join artists from the exhibition 7,7lb, a show about the imaginary of motherhood, as they discuss the historical and social backgrounds of the topic and the profound changes that have occurred in the habits, feelings, and rituals surrounding motherhood With Carmen Cardillo, Tiziana Contino, Erica Belli, Anna Guillot (KooBookArchive), Emilia Castioni, and Matteo Spertini, and moderated by Alice Grassi. Light refreshments provided.

Mona Kuhn: Artist Talk Admission by donation Brazilian-born, US-based artist Mona Kuhn is best known for her large-scale, atmospheric photographs of the human form. In this talk, Kuhn discusses her work included in The Polygon Gallery's a Handful of Dust exhibition (p. 40). as well as her latest artist book She Disappeared into Complete Silence (Steidl, 2019). Photographed at a golden modernist structure on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, the series carefully balance architectural lines, light reflections, and a single figure against the backdrop of the Californian desert. Followed by a book signing.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


B E A L E A DE R

| FE 24-70 mm F2.8 GM

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Events

116 – 117


TOURS Sun. April 7 1–3 pm

Meet outside Robert Lee YMCA, 955 Burrard St, Vancouver

Sat. April 13 12:30 pm

Downtown Public Art Projects: Guided Tour FREE, but RSVP required to: RSVP@capturephotofest.com View all the public art that Capture 2019 has on offer in Downtown Vancouver on this guided walking tour. The hop will visit Krista Belle Stewart's Dal Grauer Public Art Project (p. 14), Tom Hsu's Waterfront Canada Line Station installation (p. 29), and Alana Paterson's TransLink Public Art Project at Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain (p. 26). Paterson will give an artist talk about her work Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball (2018), in conversation with the basketball coach of the athletes featured in her photographic series.

Art Gallery at Evergreen 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam

where the hour floats: Curator Tour FREE Join curator Katherine Dennis for a tour of Amalie Atkins’s exhibition where the hour floats (p. 82). Followed by Westminster Savings Family Days, including a “Fairytale Photoshoot” (p. 140).

Please note: Some of the tour will use transit, but it includes a fair amount of walking. Transit tickets are provided complimentary.

Amalie Atkins, Ukranian Dancers Huddle, 2015, chromogenic print, 20″ × 30″, Courtesy of the artist

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Sun. April 14 12–12:30 pm

Meet at Waterfront Station next to the Jugo Juice

Sun. April 28 12–2 pm

Meet at Waterfront Station next to the Jugo Juice

Signals in the Sea: Guided Tour FREE, but RSVP required to: RSVP@capturephotofest.com Join Capture for a tour of the outdoor public art project Signals in the Sea (p. 22), curated by Jayne Wilkinson and sited on Pattison Outdoor Billboards along the Arbutus Greenway. The project includes works by photographers by Christina Battle, Eshrat Erfanian, and Susan Schuppli. Note: This is a walking tour.

Sat. April 20 2–4 pm

Meet at Gallery Jones 258 E 1st Ave #1, Vancouver

Canada Line Public Art Project: Guided Tour FREE, but RSVP required to: RSVP@capturephotofest.com Canada Line fare required Learn more about the works and artists of one of Capture’s major public art projects, the Canada Line Public Art Project (p. 28). Artists and curators will provide insight into each of the installations along the Canada Line, including Shaun Dacey, curator of Waterfront (p. 29) and Richmond–Brighouse (p. 35) stations, and Birthe Piontek, artist of the Broadway– City Hall installation. Note: This tour takes place mostly on transit, but requires some walking.

The Flats Gallery Hop FREE, but RSVP required to: RSVP@capturephotofest.com Experience the art hub of the Flats on this guided gallery led by Capture Community Engagement Assistant Laura Noonan. Visit Gallery Jones (p. 104), Monte Clark Gallery (p. 93), and Equinox Gallery ​ (p. 97). Artists and gallerists will provide informal talks at each exhibition, discussing the work of Vancouver photographers James Nizam, Greg Girard, and a group show including Fred Herzog, Vivian Maier, Harry Callahan, and others, respectively. Note: This tour requires small amounts of walking.

Tom Hsu, An urge to propose forbidden thoughts and playing with fire, 2018

Events

118 – 119


SCREENINGS Wed. April 10 7:30 pm

The Cinematheque 1131 Howe St, Vancouver

Thu. April 11 7 pm

DIM Cinema: Signals in the Sea Tickets: $12/10 + $3 membership Buy at the door or at thecinematheque.ca Ages 18+ If this cost presents a barrier, please contact programming@capturephotofest.com Programmed by Jayne Wilkinson This selection of artists’ films looks at bodies of water through technologies of seeing, sensing, and investigation to help us imagine different ecologies and less visible, even alien, environments. Exploring various approaches to “remote sensing,” these works frame life on an increasingly unliveable planet through militarized and infrastructural forms of oceanic space. What can the relationship between the visibility of a watery surface and the invisibility of what exists below it tell us about possible futures— on and beyond our own environments? In Emilija Škarnulytė’s Sirenomelia (2017, 12 min.), a post-human mythology unravels around one of humanity's oldest mythic creatures—a mermaid— who mysteriously appears among NATO facilities and a Cold War–era submarine base, while cosmic signals and white noise traverse from deep within the ocean to the farthest reaches of outer space. Christina Battle’s Water once ruled (2018, 6 min.) links satellite imagery with planetary colonization in a pseudo-documentary that speculates on how water, as a missing resource, might connect a new history of Mars with Earth’s past, present, and future. Susan Schuppli’s Trace Evidence (2016, 53 min.) explores the geological, meteorological, and hydrological appearance of nuclear evidence within the molecular arrangement of matter, using the unique signature of radioactive isotopes to reconnect the evidential links that planetary and oceanic phenomena have seemingly torn apart. For each of these artists, narratives of science fiction and material fact converge in surprising ways.

Western Front, Grand Luxe Hall 303 E 8th Ave, Vancouver

Deanna Bowen Screening and Talk FREE A Black legal aid lawyer is assigned to represent a young white student who has assaulted a fellow student who is a rising Black athlete. ON TRIAL The Long Doorway (2019) by Deanna Bowen brings her critical installation regarding the 1956 CBC teledrama by Canadian screenwriter Stanley Mann to the cinema screen. Followed by a talk by Bowen taking up familial connection points and a passion for uncovering repressed histories and traumas of Black and white Canadian histories. 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, with additional production support by the Western Front, Vancouver. The video will also play in Western Front's foyer from April 5–June 16.

Fri. April 26 5–9 pm

Nana Home Gallery 204-1685 W 13th Ave, Vancouver

7,7lb: Artist Video Screenings FREE Come join the team at Nana Home Gallery for a screening of artists’ videos, short artist interviews, and the 7,7lb exhibition on the theme of parenting and infancy. With videos by Tiziana Contino, Donatella De Cicco, and Chiara Tognoli. Light refreshments provided.

Presented in partnership by DIM Cinema and Capture Photography Festival in parallel with the 2019 Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project (p. 22).

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Emilija Škarnulytė, Sirenomelia (film still), 2017, screened as part of "DIM Cinema: Signals in the Sea" In this science fiction–inspired, post-documentary film, a woman born with “sirenomelia” (a rare congenital deformity called mermaid syndrome) takes us on a journey to a Cold War-era NATO submarine base above the Arctic Circle, where she reveals a future liberated from the military and economic structures that oppress the present.

Events

120 – 121


KNOWLEDGE NETWORK BROADCASTS Broadcast on the Knowledge Network and On demand at Knowledge.ca

Tue. April 9

The photography documentaries presented by the Knowledge Network can be viewed on broadcast television (channel 5 in Vancouver) at the listed dates and times. They are also available to stream online for the duration of Capture Photography Festival at Knowledge.ca

10 pm

Is There a Picture Dir. Harry Killas and Rick Beairsto 2017 Marian Penner Bancroft, Christos Dikeakos, Rodney Graham, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace rose from the rich countercultural milieu of 1960s Vancouver to their place of global prominence today. Drawing back the curtain on this extraordinary set of artists, the film offers a rare insight into their work, their relationships with one another, and how it is they emerged in a city until recently known more for its surrounding forests than its art.

Tue. April 9

11:35 pm

Foncie’s Photos Dir. Melanie Wood 2013 Foncie Pulice snapped thousands of photos of people from all over the province, the country, and the world on downtown Vancouver sidewalks. The snapshots capture a moment in movement, in time, and in the lives of the people in them.

Mondays, April 15–June 17

6 pm

Travelling Photographers This series from 2018 follows five renowned photographers in the field as they visit traditional communities who they forged ties with decades ago and have been photographing ever since. Each episode provides viewers with an opportunity to share the photographer’s relationship with the traditional community and to discover unknown cultures and a behind-the-scenes glance into the photographer’s work.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Tue. April 16

10 pm

Conflict

Tue. April 23

11 pm

Cinema through the Eye of Magnum

Dir. Nick Fitzhugh 2017 Delve deeply into some of the world’s best conflict photographers as they take us behind the lens and into their lives. Witness their personal and professional battles to engage with, understand, handle, capture, and present different forms of conflict in the hopes of making the world better. Nothing brings you closer to the most important human conflicts of our time.

Tue. April 16

11 pm

Through a Lens Darkly

Dir. Sophie Bassaler 2017 Explore the intersection between cinema and photography through Magnum Photo Agency photographers and their Hollywood subjects. The film presents a confrontation of two seemingly opposite worlds: fiction and reality, and a unique look behind the scenes of cinema in the making.

Tue. April 30

10 pm

The Salt of the Earth

Dir. Thomas Allen Harris 2014

Dir. Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders 2014

Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People is the first documentary to explore the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans through history up to the present. Bringing to light the hidden and unknown photos shot by both professional and vernacular African American photographers, the film opens a window into the lives of Black families, whose experiences and perspectives are often missing from the traditional historical canon.

For the last forty years, photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents in the footsteps of an ever changing humanity. He has witnessed some of the major events of our recent history, including international conflicts, starvations, and exoduses. He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, wild fauna and flora, and grandiose landscapes as part of a huge photographic project, which is a tribute to the planet’s beauty.

Tue. April 23

10 pm

The Eye of Istanbul Dir. Binnur Karaevli and Fatih Kaymak 2015 Learn the story of Ara Guler, the legendary Armenian Turkish photographer, through a culmination of his retrospective exhibition in Istanbul. Guler's artistic process, his resourcefulness, and his fearlessness are revealed as he shares photographs and stories behind his most iconic images.

Events

122 – 123


COMMUNITY EVENTS Wed. April 3 7–8:30 pm

Inform Interiors 50 Water St, Vancouver

Capture 2019 Festival Launch

Thu. April 4 6–8 pm

Monte Clark Gallery 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver

Tokyo–Yokosuka 1976–1983: Book Launch

FREE

FREE

Join us for the kick-off of the 2019 Festival following the first Capture Speaker Series talk, with Deanna Bowen (p. 112). Music, food and drink, and artists in attendance.

Vancouver-based artist Greg Girard launches his latest photobook, Tokyo–Yokosuka 1976–1983 (Magenta, 2019). This event is also the reception for his exhibition of the same name at Monte Clark Gallery (p. 93).

Wed. April 3 6–8 pm

Science World 1455 Quebec St, Vancouver

Sat. April 6, 13, 20 & 27 10 am–12 pm

Project Instant V6.0: An Instant Instant

Beaumont Gallery 316 W 5th Ave, Vancouver

Saturday Mornings Tea and Hot Sheet

FREE FREE Beau Photo kicks off the sixth edition of Project Instant, an exhibition featuring images made on all types of instant film and exploring the science behind instant photography. At this opening celebration, you can take part in instant film photography and try out Fujifilm Instax film, or have your portrait taken with Polaroid’s 8×10 large-format film.

Photo lovers: Join artists Sally Buck and Kent Lins to start your gallery hopping day with a hot tea and snack. As photographers and avid photography eyeballers, Buck and Lins visit the many shows, events, and public projects across Vancouver and are eager to share their discoveries and hear about others’ photo-based art adventures as well. Helpful ideas, maps, a hot sheet, tea, and snacks are complimentary.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Sat. April 6 10:30 am

Art Gallery at Evergreen 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam

Sat. April 6 7 pm–midnight

Slow Art Day FREE, but registration required email programs@evergreenculturalcentre.ca Slow Art Day is a global event with a simple mission: help more people discover for themselves the joy of looking at and loving art. One day each year—April 6 in 2019—people all over the world visit local museums and galleries to look at art slowly. Participants look at three works of art for ten minutes each and then meet as a group to discuss. Following this slow-looking experience, join curator Katherine Dennis for a facilitated conversation in front of the artwork.

Sat. April 6 1–3 pm

Roundhouse Community Arts Centre 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver

Flash Forward Incubator Celebration & Silent Auction

Roundhouse Community Arts Centre 181 Roundhouse Mews,Vancouver

Roll Call Volume 04 FREE Roll Call is a recurring photography show that celebrates honest photography and gives an unfiltered look at the photographic processes from some of Vancouver’s finest photographers. This fast paced, one-day event pushes the boundaries of traditional analogue photography. By condensing what is traditionally a slow process into a single-day format, photographers are required to work quickly, creating imagery driven by impulse while maintaining a sense of mindfulness to their work. On the morning of the show, ten photographers will each be given a roll of slide film and will have eight-hours to capture all thirty-six frames. Then, the rolls will be collected, processed, mounted, loaded into slide carousels, and projected that evening in their entirety without edits. Presenting every image captured, unedited, gives insight to how each photographer creates their images and how they approach their work. Presented in partnership by Nelson Mouëllic Studio and Capture Photography Festival.

FREE Supported by London Drugs and FUJIFILM Students of the second BC edition of Flash Forward Incubator, who come from high schools around the province, exhibit their photographic works. All artworks are for sale, with proceeds going back into the participating schools’ art programs. For more information on the Incubator Program and exhibition, see page 134.

Tue. April 9 8–9:30 pm

Surrey Art Gallery UrbanScreen 13458 107A Ave, Surrey

Pixel Art Party @ UrbanScreen FREE Head out to UrbanScreen for an eclectic evening of hands-on art activities, digital art, and electronic music. First local youth screen digital animations created during a two-day intensive with UrbanScreen exhibiting artist Nicolas Sassoon. This is followed by a full playthrough of Sassoon’s mesmerizing animation Liquid Landscapes (p. 80) and the debut of a suite of fresh tracks inspired by the artwork. The artist lineup includes Yu Su (You're Me), JS Aurelius (Ascetic House), Jean Brazeau, Scott W., Baby Blue (S.M.I.L.E), NuZi Collective, and Veron X/O.

Events

124 – 125


COMMUNITY EVENTS Thu. April 11 6–8 pm

Listel Hotel 13458 107A Ave, Surrey

Sat. April 13 The Polygon Gallery 6 pm–late 101 Carrie Cates Ct, North Vancouver

Collage in the City

2018 National Pictures of the Year Gala

FREE Meet Barbara Strigel and Mark Mizgala, the artists of Collage in the City, at this exhibition reception. Coordinated by Art Rentals & Sales operated by the Vancouver Art Gallery, and presented by Capture Photography Festival and the Listel Hotel.

Fri. April 12 6 pm

READ Books Emily Carr University 520 E 1st Ave, Vancouver

Janice Guy: Book Launch FREE Join READ Books and the artist for the Vancouver launch of Janice Guy, the first monograph on British-born photographer Janice Guy, gathering her radical experiments in photography from the late 1970s. Made while she was a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, this selection of photographs sheds light on Guy’s work as an artist before she gained international renown as a gallerist of contemporary art. The German photographer Thomas Struth, a fellow student in Germany at the time, has written a moving essay for this book about their formative years and ongoing friendship. The book also includes an introduction by American photographer Justine Kurland, which makes a compelling case for the reconsideration of these photographs today. The work presented in Janice Guy, much of which appears here for the first time, reverberates as never before amid the current proclivity for producing and circulating images of ourselves. Janice Guy was published by Hunters Point Press, and edited by Barney Kulok and Justine Kurland. For this event, Guy speaks with Vancouver curator Lee Plested about the rediscovery of this historic work and its resonance today, her recent exhibition at Higher Pictures, New York, and her current explorations printing from an archive of negatives.

Tickets: $40 Purchase via npac.ca/store or on the door Winners of all the National Pictures of the Year categories are announced during this gala event, including Canadian Photojournalist of the Year, sponsored by the Canadian Press, and Canadian Photograph of the Year, sponsored by the Globe and Mail. Guests also receive their yearly edition of the Year in Review. Doors at 6 pm; ceremony at 8 pm. Hors d’oeuvres served and cash bar.

Thu. April 18 5–8:30 pm

Beaty Biodiversity Museum UBC Campus 2212 Main Mall, Vancouver

Skin & Bones: Book Launch Admission by donation Join us for an evening with Catherine M. Stewart, the artist behind the exhibition Skin & Bones at Beaty Biodversity Museum, in celebration of the launch of her book accompanying the exhibition.

Thu. April 18 6–9 pm

Massy Books 229 E Georgia St, Vancouver

Cuba—Twilight of the Revolution: Book Launch FREE Cuba—Twilight of the Revolution, a photobook by Alistair Henning, is a capsule of nostalgia for a recent moment already passed. In January 2012, Fidel Castro was still clinging to power, while Cuba’s people grew increasingly impatient for meaningful and positive change. Henning documented this transitional time using the Hipstamatic app on an iPhone 4s, allowing him to capture images not possible with a larger, more conspicuous camera.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Fri. April 19 6:30–8:30 pm

Audain Art Museum 4350 Blackcomb Way, Whistler

Sat. April 27 2–4 pm

Art After Dark–Maker Month– Photography Free for Audain Art Museum members or with museum admission ($18) Be inspired by the work of Joseph Tisiga. This “Art After Dark” explores the varied ways in which Tisiga produces work for his exhibitions as well as the use of both documentary and conceptual photography, also linked to the artists featured in the museum’s permanent collection. Visit the Schmidtke Studio to learn about documentary and conceptual photography and stage your own photography scene. There will be a cabin structure installation and a variety of props for visitors to have fun with. Inspiration will be drawn from Tisiga’s conceptual photography scenes in the current exhibition Tales of an Empty Cabin: Somebody Nobody Was … This adult-specific event is followed by a youth event (see p. 140).

Sat. April 20 12–5 pm

Studio 884 884 E Georgia St, Vancouver

We Will Buy Your Dreams: Meet the Artist FREE The exhibition We Will Buy Your Dreams is a visual exploration of the psychological manipulation of the lottery targeting the vulnerable and the poor. It focuses on an old-fashioned corner store where locals gather to purchase their morning newspaper; this store is a magnet for escapist dreams of a better life. Meet the artist event: 12–5 pm; artist talk: 1–2 pm.

Meet at Pendulum Gallery 885 W Georgia St, Vancouver

Sony Photo Walk with John Lehmann FREE, but reservation required to: RSVP@capturephotofest.com Space limited Join celebrated Canadian photojournalist John Lehmann on a photo walk adventure through Vancouver’s downtown and historic Gastown neighbourhoods. During the photo walk, Lehmann will discuss photographic techniques and creative composition, as the group visits some of the most iconic landmarks of the city. Sponsored by Sony of Canada Ltd.

Sat. April 27 8–11 pm

SAD Mag Pop-up 1050 E Hastings St, Vancouver

Disposable Camera Project IV FREE The Disposable Camera Project (DCP) is a series of exhibitions that feature photographs captured on disposable cameras by Vancouver film photographers. Instant, single-use, and discardable, disposable cameras capture and embody the fleeting interactions we have with the spaces we call home. When the word “nostalgia” was first used, it referred to medical-grade homesickness. Today, the term is always on our tongues, partly due to pop culture’s fascination with the past. As a companion to SAD Magazine’s print publication, now in its tenth year, DCP IV takes nostalgia as its central theme: from rose-coloured glasses, to resurrecting the dead, to ruminating on what could have been. Each artist, using one 35 mm disposable camera, engages their own nostalgia, creating a reflexive interrogation of memory, histories, and parallel temporalities, investigating the sweetness and sadness of loved things lost. Participating artists: Tom Hsu, Taby Cheng, Karilynn Ming Ho, Hyung-Min Yoon, Christian Nicolay, and Helen Shaw. Cash bar. Venue support from PortLiving. Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant

Events

126 – 127


WORKSHOPS Sat. 4 & Sun. 5 April 6–9 pm

VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver

Photoshop: Moving Photo Remix

Sun. April 7 11 am–1 pm

Brix Studio 102-211 Columbia St, Vancouver

Your Digital Presence: Exploring Art, Copyright, and Online Engagement

Cost: $74, or $50 with any VIVO Producer Membership (+GST) Book via moving-photo-remix.eventbrite.ca One extended subsidy available

FREE but registration required by Thu Apr 4 Email RSVP@capturephotofest.com to register or visit capturephotofest.com/events Space limited

This two-day workshop with Josh Hite is a fun and creative introduction to animating photos using Photoshop. Each session combines visual study of examples, group discussion, and hands-on experience. Gain technical knowledge of Photoshop! Learn about local and international artists who manipulate photos and discuss the meaning and effect of the resulting images! Create photo remixes of your own!

Presented in partnership by Capture, the Digital Tattoo Project, and UBC Library.

During Session 1, you’ll learn various techniques for removing and replacing portions of photographs for meaningful effect in order to produce three intriguing images. You can either bring in photos to use, find them online, or snap a few during the workshop. Then for Session 2, you’ll learn how to use Photoshop to animate selected parts of your images. You’ll export them as GIF and MOV files so you can share them online! Prerequisite: No experience necessary. Presented in partnership by VIVO Media Arts Centre and Capture Photography Festival.

Sharing media digitally is easier and more necessary for artists than ever—think Flickr and Instagram. However, as an artist, navigating the maze of online licencing, ownership, and personal representation, especially in the age of social media, can be confusing. To cut through the confusion and create a path for themselves, artists need tools. Tools can be as simple as asking the right questions to learn what you need to know, like: What is a licence? How does what I share shape my digital identity? How can open sharing be beneficial for my art? This facilitated workshop will work through these questions, offer definitions, and give attendees the tools to learn how to raise the right questions to inform their digital identity and representation online. We hope participants will walk away with a firm sense of what copyright is, how it applies to their work, and what questions they should ask when posting their artwork online to shape their digital identity and connect with others. This presentation was developed by UBC Library and the Digital Tattoo Project. It is supported by the Digital Rights Community Grant Program, a partnership between Digital Justice Lab, Tech Reset Canada, and Centre for Digital Rights.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Sat. April 13 11 am–3 pm

Vancouver Lipont Art Centre 4211 No 3 Rd, Richmond

Sat. April 20 3 pm

Beaumont Gallery 316 W 5th Ave, Vancouver

Photography without Cameras: Lumen Printing Workshop

Photo Collage Workshop Using Free Software

$15/person (incl. two 8″ × 10″ prints) Registration required; lumenprints.eventbrite.ca

FREE but booking required (space limited) Register at www.vangalleries.com

In this hands-on workshop, artist Phyllis Schwartz explains and demonstrates the image-making process of lumen prints (photograms made without a camera). Participants will make photograms of plant materials and discover how they leave marks and traces on photosensitive paper, making works that look like colourful x-rays. There is opportunity to participate in the entire process, including gathering materials, composing two images, and developing two 8″ × 10″ prints.

In this workshop, artist Kent Lins shows participants how to look at photos as full of potential for creating entirely new artworks. He’ll demonstrate this using software that is available online free of charge or at a low cost compared to other expensive and complicated programs. Participants will learn that cutting, pasting, collaging, and layering can be done easily, without spending hours figuring it out. Lins will explain how software is just a tool—like a shovel, a car, or a dishwasher—that is there for you to accomplish what you want done.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant Personal computers are not necessary. Sat. 13 & Sun. 14 April 10 am–6 pm

VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver

Super 8: Shoot to Screen Ages: 16 to 24 years old FREE but registration required via super8film.eventbrite.ca

Sat. 20 & Sun. 21 April 12–6 pm

VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver

Cinematography: Ways of Seeing Cost: $170, or $125 with any VIVO Producer Membership (+GST) Book via ways-of-seeing.eventbrite.ca One extended subsidy available

Email: RSVP@capturephotofest.com Artist Nisha Platzer runs a weekend Super 8 workshop for youth aged 16–24. See page 139 for details.

Ignite your own visual storytelling style in this workshop with with cinematographer Devan Scot. This multi-day workshop will enable you to make better use of your camera and lighting gear to enrich your storytelling with a deepened understanding of the theory and practice of cinematography. Back by high demand: please don't wait to sign up! Prerequisite: Participants must have basic knowledge of rudimentary camera operation, such as exposure and focus, though a very brief review will be provided. Participants seeking an introduction to rudimentary camera operation should consider taking VIVO’s Camera Lights Sound workshop. Presented in partnership by VIVO Media Arts Centre and Capture Photography Festival

Events

128 – 129




Capture’s Youth Program continues to grow each year, centred around the Flash Forward Incubator Program—BC, a new model for arts education and support in Canada developed by the Magenta Foundation, Toronto. In addition to Incubator, programming includes child-, family-, and youthfriendly exhibitions, events, and workshops. The 2019 Youth Program is supported by PwC.

“Through PwC Canada's Young People Project, we are delighted to be supporting Capture’s 2019 Youth Program. We encourage our people to engage in meaningful community experiences that build capabilities and help young people maximize their potential. Community workshops, youth-led exhibitions, and the Flash Forward Incubator Program inspire young creative minds and prepare promising artists for their transition out of high school and into the next phases of their careers. We invite you to join us in celebrating the achievements of this year’s participants of the Flash Forward Incubator on April 6 as the student works are auctioned off, with all proceeds going back into the schools art programs.” —David Neale, PwC Partner and Youth Ambassador, BC Region

Working with Super 8 film, documentation photo, Courtesy of Nisha Plazter (see p. 139)


Youth Program

FLASH FORWARD INCUBATOR 134 – 135

EXHIBITIONS 136 – 138

WORKSHOPS 139

EVENTS 140


Presented in partnership with Magenta Foundation

Capture is pleased to partner with Magenta Foundation, Canada’s pioneering charitable artspublishing house based in Toronto and the founder of the Flash Forward Incubator Program, to present the second edition of the Incubator in British Columbia. The Incubator both proposes a new exciting model for arts education and support in Canada and prepares emerging artists for their transition out of high school and into the next phases of their artistic careers.

Generously supported by Vancouver Foundation.

Offered free of charge outside of the regular school curriculum, the Incubator gives students opportunity to engage with critical and contemporary art ideas and methodologies they may not be working with in their art classes. Developed in collaboration with industry professionals and educators, the program integrates independent and interactive instructional methods, both online and in-person, and offers diverse opportunities to give and receive feedback from other students, teachers, and Magenta and Capture’s education team.

In addition to an education experience, the Incubator offers students a signature piece for their portfolios; a publication, produced by Magenta; and an exhibition and silent auction, held during Capture. This year’s Flash Forward Incubator Program is open to a wide range of photography-based projects that explore the ideas and actualities of “Boundaries.” These artworks examine the role that boundaries have played in the history of art; censorship, mediocrity, and innovation, and how these impact us personally in the creation of our zeitgeist; and the current intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of our era.

FLASH FORWARD INCUBATOR PROGRAM British Columbia

BC Participating Schools

Kurtis Lew, Ghost, 2019

Georges P. Vanier Secondary, Courtenay-Comox John Oliver Secondary, Vancouver Magee Secondary, Vancouver Point Grey Secondary, Vancouver Stratford Hall, Vancouver Templeton Secondary, Vancouver Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver Thomas Haney Secondary, Maple Ridge Argyle Secondary, North Vancouver Gleneagle Secondary, Coquitlam Highland Secondary, Courtenay-Comox Mark R. Isfeld Secondary, Courtenay-Comox

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


April 2–6 Tu–F: 9 am–10 pm; Sa: 9 am–5 pm

EXHIBITION BOUNDARIES Roundhouse Community Arts Centre 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver

After completing their final assignments, the Incubator participants exhibit one of their best works in Boundaries, the 2019 Flash Forward Incubator Exhibition, at Roundhouse Community Arts Centre in Yaletown. Many of the students will be in attendance for the Silent Auction, and it’s a chance for the community to congratulate them on their completion of the Incubator as well as to scope out the next generation of photographic talent out of British Columbia. Each of the professionally printed and framed works is available for purchase at the Silent Auction on April 6. All funds raised go back into the participating schools' art programs. Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

Sat. April 6 1–3 pm

SILENT AUCTION

For more information on the Flash Forward Incubator Program, visit www.magentafoundation.org/ flash-forward-incubator/

Roundhouse Community Arts Centre 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver

If you’re a teacher or principal in BC and would like to express interest in participating in next year’s Incubator, please email info@capturephotofest.com

Bodhan Lee, 2019

Youth Program

134 – 135


April 6–15

Remington Gallery

Curated by Roxanne Gagnon, Alex Waber and Kristen Roos

108 E Hastings St, Vancouver Sa&Su: 12–4pm; M–F by appt. (604-218-2109)

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

In transit: Reflections captures the process of Arts Umbrella students creating the work In transit, installed at Olympic Village Station as part of Capture’s 2019 Canada Line Public Art Project (p. 31). The exhibition highlights each student’s individual process of experimentation, practice, and discovery throughout the Fall 2018 session. In two classes at Arts Umbrella, students aged 13–19 developed their darkroom and digital photography practices. Students worked individually and collaboratively to interrupt themes explored throughout the semester, and unpacked how darkroom and digital photography intersect and complement each other.

IN TRANSIT: REFLECTIONS

Group Exhibtion

Opening Reception Sat, Apr 6, 5–8 pm

Bali Chu-Mehrer, 2019

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


April 6–21

The Polygon Gallery

Curated by Justin Ramsey

101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver Tu–Su: 10 am–5 pm; M: closed

Chester Fields is The Polygon Gallery’s teen outreach program. Every year, the gallery invites young artists in high school from across the Lower Mainland to create an original work of photographic art in response to a unique theme. This year’s theme, Something In My Eye, challenges artists to think close to the camera’s lens and to experiment with ways of interrupting or changing the lens’s ability to view and capture its photographic subject. The submissions were juried by Peppa Martin, writer, curator, and director of Truth and Beauty Gallery; Ian McGuffie, award-winning photographer and Head of Digital Photography at VanArts; and Birthe Piontek, acclaimed artist and faculty member at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Admission by donation Opening Reception: Sat, Apr 6, 1–2 pm

EXHIBITION

Group Exhibtion

CHESTER FIELDS 2019: SOMETHING IN MY EYE

2018 Chester Fields finalist Oliver New, The Deserted, 2018, inkjet print

Youth Program

136 – 137


April 27

Back Alley Gallery Project

Curated by Amelia Guimarin

Located in the alley behind 2848 E 8th Ave, Vancouver Sat, Apr 27, 5–9 pm

On Friendship: An Exhibition of Portraits by Children is curated by local community leader and artist Amelia Guimarin. Guimarin led more than twenty children aged 5–12 from the Frog Hollow Nootka School Age Care program in a series of photography workshops in late March and early April. These workshops culminated with the children creating the studio-quality portraits of each other included in On Friendship.

Supported by a London Drugs Printing Grant.

The exhibition aims to explore how children perceive and relate to each other through the medium of photography and features one portrait from each child artist. Children have been paired so that each child has the opportunity to act as both subject and photographer. This public reception in a residential back alley shares their work with their families, friends, and the general public in a celebration that includes a community potluck.

EXHIBITION

Group Exhibtion

ON FRIENDSHIP: AN EXHIBITION OF PORTRAITS BY CHILDREN

Jameson, age 7, a participant in the workshops for On Friendship: An Exhibition of Portraits by Children with local community artist Amelia Guimarin. Photo: Amelia Guimarin.

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


WORKSHOP

SUPER 8: SHOOT TO SCREEN

April 13 & 14

VIVO Media Arts Centre

Ages: 16 to 24 years old FREE but registration required via super8film.eventbrite.ca

Join artist Nisha Platzer for this weekend workshop where participants will learn a brief history of Super 8 film, from its release in 1965 by Eastman Kodak to its use by contemporary artists and filmmakers of today. Then everyone will shoot their very own Super 8 films, process the film by hand, edit the film manually, and have the final works shown in a screening with live music.

Please bring: clothes that can be stained (long sleeves, long pants, closed-toe shoes), dish gloves, a lunch for each day

Day 1: We'll learn about the format of Super 8 and see some examples before going out and shooting our own films.

This workshop is generously supported by an ArtStarts Creative Spark Grant.

Presented in partnership by VIVO Media Arts Centre and Capture Photography Festival.

Day 2: We'll process the films in photochemistry and splice them together before the screening!

WORKSHOP

FAMILY COLLAGE DROP-IN

April 20

Cartems Donuts

2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver Sa&Su: 10 am–6 pm

Families and children aged 7–12 years are invited to attend our family drop-in activity with artist Dana Hawkes, who will facilitate a 3D camera building workshop using scissors, glue, cardstock, and prints of his photographs from Still Lives Extreme (p. 98).

2190 Main St, Vancouver 10 am–12 pm (drop-in)

Free to attend. Any children under the age of 7 must be supervised by a parent. Presented in partnership by Cartems Donuts and Capture Photography Festival.

Youth Program

138 – 139


EVENT

WESTMINSTER SAVINGS FAMILY DAYS

April 13

Art Gallery at Evergreen 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam 1–4 pm (drop-in) FREE

EVENT

ART AFTER DARK—MAKER MONTH—PHOTOGRAPHY

April 19

Audain Art Museum

Join free family-friendly art activities and a tour of the AGE’s current exhibition, Amalie Atkins: where the hour floats (p. 82). Be the hero or villain in your very own fairytale as part of the “Fairytale Photoshoot”! Create a silhouette background and dress up in costumes to tell your story. Participants will take home a photo memento. Family-friendly exhibition tour at 2 pm.

Be inspired by the work of Joseph Tisiga. This “Art After Dark” explores the varied ways in which Tisiga produces work for his exhibitions as well as the use of both documentary and conceptual photography, also linked to the artists featured in the museum’s permanent collection.

FREE for ages 18 & under

Visit the Schmidtke Studio to learn about documentary and conceptual photography and stage your own photography scene. There will be a cabin structure installation and a variety of props for visitors to have fun with. Inspiration will be drawn from Tisiga’s conceptual photography scenes in the current exhibition Tales of an Empty Cabin: Somebody Nobody Was . . .

Youth 12 and under must be accompanied by an adult.

This youth-specific event is followed by an adult event (see p. 127).

4350 Blackcomb Way, Whistler 3:30–5:30 pm Free for Audain Art Museum members or with museum admission ($18)

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019





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1 Mark Mizgala, Smartphone 003, 2017–18, 26″ × 21″ 2 Barbara Strigel, Progression, 2018, 26″ × 21″

Barbara Strigel Mark Mizgala

April–September 2019

COLLAGE IN THE CITY

Opening Reception April 11, 6–8 pm 2

Barbara Strigel and Mark Mizgala address human place and human impact on the urban landscape in Collage in the City. In her series At Street Level, Strigel works in street photography combined with digital collage to explore the idea that the built and perceived spaces in the city exist both simultaneously and separately. By working from a distance, Strigel is able to capture the anonymity of the street. Meanwhile in his Smartphone series, Mizgala focuses on humankind’s disposition to consume, discard, and pollute. In the comprehensive ecosystem of a city, garbage is examined for its impact on the urban landscape through spaces it occupies and its liminality. 1

Using photography and collage elements, Strigel and Mizgala frame the city as a space of transition and change.








CALENDAR

Thu, Mar 14 7–9 pm

Opening

Lynne Cohen: These Walls

Burnaby Art Gallery

p. 84

7–9 pm

Opening

Kali Spitzer: An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance

grunt gallery

p. 44

Opening

Jim Breukelman: Altered States

West Vancouver Art Museum

p. 85

6–9 pm

Opening

Mike Grill: Rome

Fine Art Framing & Services

p. 87

7–9 pm

Opening

Josema Zamorano: Encounters

Mónica Reyes Gallery

p. 86

6–7 pm

Capture Speaker Series

Deanna Bowen: Notes on A Harlem Nocturne

Inform Interiors

p. 112

6–8 pm

Community

Project Instant V6.0: An Instant Instant

Science World

p. 124

7–8:30 pm

Festival Launch

Capture 2019 Festival Launch

Inform Interiors

p. 124

6–8 pm

Opening/Book Launch

Greg Girard: Tokyo–Yokosuka 1976–1983

Monte Clark Gallery

p. 93

6–8:30 pm

Talk

Analogue Photography in a Digital Era

Massy Books

p. 114

6–9 pm

Opening

Group Exhibition: Unearthing, Folding, and Burning

Malaspina Printmakers

p. 91

6–9 pm

Opening

Christos Dikeakos: Patisserie Duchamp

Chernoff Fine Art

p. 92

6–9 pm

Workshop

Photoshop: Moving Photo Remix

VIVO Media Arts Centre

p. 128

7–9 pm

Opening

Iris Film Collective: LOOPDALOOP

Burrard View Fieldhouse

p. 95

7–9 pm

Opening

Dane Murner: Nightcrawl

Charles Clark Gallery

p. 89

7–9 pm

Opening

Deanna Bowen: A Harlem Nocturne

Contemporary Art Gallery

p. 48

7–9 pm

Opening

Blaine Campbell: A Firmament

Republic Gallery

p. 94

6–9 pm

Workshop

Josh Hite: Moving Photo Remix

VIVO Media Arts Centre

p. 128

7–9 pm

Opening

Roxanne Charles: The Strata of Many Truths

Museum of Vancouver

p. 96

10 am–12 pm

Community

Saturday Mornings Tea and Hot Sheet

Beaumont Gallery

p. 124

10:30 am

Community

Slow Art Day

Art Gallery at Evergreen

p. 125

1–3 pm

Talk

There Is Truth Here: Panel Discussion

Museum of Vancouver

p. 114

1–3 pm

Community

Flash Forward Incubator Celebration & Silent Auction

Roundhouse Community Arts Centre

p. 135

1–2 pm

Opening

Group Exhibition: Chester Fields 2019

The Polygon Gallery

p. 137

2 pm

Talk

Blaine Campbell: Artist Talk

Republic Gallery

p. 114

2–4 pm

Opening

Primary Colour

Equinox Gallery

p. 97

2–5 pm

Opening

Hua Jin: Dundee

Viridian Gallery

p. 99

5–8 pm

Opening

Group Exhibition: In transit: Reflections

Remington Gallery

p. 136

7 pm–12 am

Community

Roll Call Volume 04

Roundhouse Community Arts Centre

p. 125

7–10 pm

Opening

Dana Hawkes: Still Lives Extreme

Cartems Donuts

p. 98

11 am–1 pm

Workshop

Your Digital Presence

Brix Studio

p. 128

1–3 pm

Tour

Downtown Public Art Projects

Meet at Robert Lee YMCA

p. 118

1–3 pm

Talk

UnderExposed: Sunday Art Salon

100 Braid St Art Studios & Gallery

p. 114

4–8 pm

Opening

Barrie Jones: Berlin Project II 1945–2018

Lights Out Space

p. 100

6–7 pm

Capture Speakers Series

Jayne Wilkinson: Signals in the Sea

Inform Interiors

p. 112

8–9:30 pm

Community

Pixel Art Party

Surrey Art Gallery UrbanScreen

p. 125

10 pm

Broadcast

Is There a Picture

The Knowledge Network

p.122

11:35 pm

Broadcast

Foncie’s Photos

The Knowledge Network

p.122

Screening

DIM Cinema: Signals in the Sea

The Cinematheque

p. 120

Tue, Mar 19 7–9 pm Fri, Mar 29

Wed, Apr 3

Thu, Apr 4

Fri, Apr 5

Sat, Apr 6

Sun, Apr 7

Tue, Apr 9

Wed, Apr 10 7:30 pm

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


Thu, Apr 11 6–8 pm

Reception

Taehoon Kim: Finding My Father at Yongpyong

Lynn Valley Public Library

p. 79

6–9 pm

Opening

Michael Love: Shadow Architecture

Franc Gallery

p. 101

6–9 pm

Opening

Group Exhibition: NPAC

Pendulum Gallery

p. 88

6–8 pm

Community

Collage in the City: Meet the Artists

Listel Hotel

p.126

7 pm

Screening

Deanna Bowen: Screening and Talk

Western Front, Grand Luxe Hall

p. 120

6 pm

Book Launch

Janice Guy: Book Launch

READ Books

p. 126

7–12 am

Opening

Dan Jackson: What It Is

Studio 730

p. 102

10 am–12 pm

Community

Saturday Mornings Tea and Hot Sheet

Beaumont Gallery

p. 124

10 am–6 pm

Workshop

Super 8: Shoot to Screen

VIVO Media Arts Centre

p. 129

11 am–3 pm

Workshop

Photography without Cameras

Vancouver Lipont Art Centre

p. 129

12–4 pm

Opening

Julie F Hill: Space Out of Time

Terminal Creek Contemporary

p. 90

12:30 pm

Tour

where the hour floats: Curator Tour

Art Gallery at Evergreen

p. 118

1pm

Opening

Alana Paterson: Skwxwú7mesh Nation Basketball

The Polygon Gallery

p. 27

1–4 pm (drop-in)

Youth

Westminster Savings Family Days

Art Gallery at Evergreen

p. 140

2–3 pm

Talk

TRANSITION on the Outskirts of Photography

Deer Lake Gallery

p. 115

4–5 pm

Talk

Andrew Legere: Anomalous Experience

The Playground

p. 115

4–6 pm

Talk

Sally Buck and Kent Lins: Artist Talks & Happy Hour

Beaumont Studios

p. 115

6 pm–late

Community

2018 National Pictures of the Year Gala

The Polygon Gallery

p. 126

10 am–6 pm

Workshop

Super 8: Shoot to Screen

VIVO Media Arts Centre

p. 129

12–12:30 pm

Tour

Signals in the Sea

Meet at Arbutus Greenway

p. 119

4–5 pm

Talk

Rodrigo Tomzhinsky (Tom) & Andrew Legere

The Playground

p. 115

6–8 pm

Opening

Paolo Rubini: HANDS ON–A handcrafted human mosaic

VIFF Vancity Theatre

p. 103

Broadcast

Travelling Photographers

The Knowledge Network

p. 122

Fri, Apr 12

Sat, Apr 13

Sun, Apr 14

Mon, Apr 15 6 pm Tue, Apr 16 6–7 pm

Capture Speaker Series

Krista Belle Stewart & Tania Willard: Orthagonal Heart Lines

Inform Interiors

p. 113

10 pm

Broadcast

Conflict

The Knowledge Network

p. 123

11 pm

Broadcast

Through a Lens Darkly

The Knowledge Network

p. 123

12:15–1 pm

Talk

Kali Spitzer: Artist Talk

Native Education College

p. 115

5–8 pm

Opening

James Nizam: Apparent Motions

Gallery Jones

p. 104

5–8:30 pm

Book Launch

Skin & Bones: Book Launch

Beaty Biodiversity Museum

p. 126

6–9 pm

Book Launch

Cuba – Twilight of the Revolution: Book Launch

Massy Books

p. 126

7:30 pm

Performance

Elizabeth Milton: A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes

VIVO Media Arts Centre

p. 52

11 pm

Broadcast

Through a Lens Darkly

The Knowledge Network

p. 123

Youth/Community

Art After Dark—Maker Month—Photography

Audain Art Museum

10 am–12 pm (drop-in)

Youth

Collage: Family Workshop

Cartems Donuts

p. 139

10 am–12 pm

Community

Saturday Mornings Tea and Hot Sheet

Beaumont Gallery

p. 124

12–5 pm

Community

We Will Buy Your Dreams: Meet the Artist

Studio 884

p. 127

12–6 pm

Workshop

Cinematography: Ways of See

VIVO Media Arts Centre

p. 129

2–4 pm

Tour

The Flats Gallery Hop

Meet at Gallery Jones

p. 119

2–4 pm

Closing

Ryan Quast: The Box Project

Wil Aballe Art Projects | WAAP

p. 83

3 pm

Talk

Diana Freundl & Gayatri Sinha

Room 4East, Vancouver Art Gallery

p. 116

3 pm

Workshop

Photo Collage Workshop

Beaumont Gallery

p. 129

Thu, Apr 18

Fri, Apr 19 3:30–8:30 pm

p. 140/127

Sat, Apr 20

Calendar

152 – 153


Sun, Apr 21 12–6 pm

Workshop

Cinematography: Ways of Seeing

VIVO Media Arts Centre

p. 129

Broadcast

Travelling Photographers

The Knowledge Network

p. 122

Mon, Apr 22 6 pm Tue, Apr 23 6–7 pm

Capture Speaker Series

Panel: Personality/Persona—Identity Building in Photography

Inform Interiors

p. 113

10 pm

Broadcast

The Eye of Istanbul

The Knowledge Network

p. 123

11 pm

Broadcast

Cinema through the Eye of Magnum

The Knowledge Network

p. 123

6–7:30 pm

Talk

The Adventures of Travel

Beau Photo Supplies

p. 116

7–9pm

Opening

Group Exhibition: Green Glass Door

Trapp Projects

p. 105

11:30 am–2 pm

Talk

7,7lb: Artist Talk

Nana Home Gallery

p. 116

5–9 pm

Screening

7,7lb: Artist Video Screenings

Nana Home Gallery

p. 120

7–9 pm

Opening

Karen Zalamea: Subarctic Phase

Access Gallery

p. 106

2–4 pm

Community

Photo Walk with John Lehmann

Meet at Pendulum Gallery

p. 127

3 pm

Capture Speaker Series

Pushpamala N

Vancouver Art Gallery, Room 4East

p. 113

3:30 pm

Talk

Drone Photography

Vancouver Convention Centre East

p. 116

5–9 pm

Youth

Group Exhibition: On Friendship

Back Alley Gallery Project

p. 138

7–10 pm

Community

Manifestations: Show Closing Party

ARC Gallery

p. 116

8–11 pm

Community

Disposable Camera Project IV

SAD Mag Pop-up

p. 127

12–2 pm

Tour

Canada Line Public Art Project: Guided Tour

Meet at Waterfront Station

p. 119

2–5 pm

Talk

Manifestations: Artist Talks

ARC Gallery

p. 116

3 pm

Talk

Mona Kuhn: Artist Talk

The Polygon Gallery

p. 116

Screening

Travelling Photographers

The Knowledge Network

p. 122

5:30–7 pm

Capture Speaker Series

Birthe Piontek & Kimberly Phillips: Evening Song

Inform Interiors

p. 113

10 pm

Screening

The Salt of the Earth

The Knowledge Network

p. 123

Thu, Apr 25

Fri, Apr 26

Sat, Apr 27

Sun, Apr 28

Mon, Apr 29 6 pm Tue, Apr 30

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


CAPTURE MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM

To purchase a Capture Membership or become a Supporter, contact engagement@capturephotofest.com or visit capturephotofest.com

Erin McSavaney, New Works, at Equinox Gallery, a 2018 Capture Selected Exhibition. Photo: roaming-the-planet (CC-BY-NC-ND)

Can’t get enough Capture? Become a member of Capture Photography Festival Society and celebrate with us year-round. By purchasing a membership you are contributing to our mandate to increase the status of photography through a variety of events and programs and to foster an appreciation of the art and profession of photography.

2019 Membership benefits include

Membership Levels

• •

One Year $20 – Individual $15 – Students / Seniors

• •

• • • • •

Personalized membership card 20% discount on printing with London Drugs Photolab during April 2019 20% discount on workshop registration at Malaspina Printmakers during April 2019 15% discount on glasses of beer, flights, and growler fills at Strange Fellows Brewing during April 2019 2 for 1 donuts at all Cartems Donuts locations during April 2019 Flash sales on Capture Limited Editions year-round Exclusive e-newsletters with the latest news from Capture and our community A vote at Capture’s Annual General Meeting More perks to be announced!

Two Year $30 – Individual $25 – Students / Seniors

Achieve Supporter status with a donation of $200 or more. With a minimum donation of $200, you will be recognized as a Supporter of Capture Photography Festival. In addition to membership benefits, receive exclusive invitations to Supporter-only events during Capture 2019 and Capture 2020. You will also receive a full tax receipt and acknowledgement on our website and in every Capture Magazine.

154 – 155


MAP

Exhibitions

Public Art

1.

Access Gallery 222 E Georgia St, Vancouver

Billboards

2.

Art Gallery at Evergreen 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam

38. Arbutus Greenway

3.

Back Alley Gallery Project 2848 E 8th Ave, Vancouver

4.

Burnaby Art Gallery 6344 Deer Lake Ave, Burnaby

seven billboards between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver 39. Quebec St and 5th Ave

5.

Burrard View Fieldhouse 545 North Slocan St, Vancouver

6.

Cartems Donuts 2190 Main St, Vancouver

7.

Charles Clark Gallery @ Strange Fellows 1345 Clark Dr, Vancouver

Canada Line & SkyTrain Stations

8.

Chernoff Fine Art 265 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver

40. Waterfront Station Canada Line

9.

Contemporary Art Gallery 555 Nelson St, Vanocuver

41. Vancouver City Centre Station Canada Line

four billboards

10. Equinox Gallery 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver

42. Olympic Village Station Canada Line

11. Fine Art Framing & Services 100-1000 Parker St, Vancouver

43. Broadway–City Hall Station Canada Line

12. Franc Gallery 1654 Franklin St, Vancouver

44. King Edward Station Canada Line

13. Gallery Jones Unit 1–258 E 1st Ave, Vancouver

45. Lansdowne Station Canada Line

14. grunt gallery, 116–350 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver

46. Richmond–Brighouse Station Canada Line

15. Lights Out Space 8930 Oak St, Vancouver

47. Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station Expo Line

16. Malaspina Printmakers 1555 Duranleau St, Vancouver 17. Mónica Reyes Gallery 602 E Hastings St, Vancouver

48. Dal Grauer Substation, 944 Burrard St, Vancouver

18. Monte Clark Gallery 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver 19. Museum of Vancouver 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver 20. North Vancouver Distric Public Library 1277 Lynn Valley Rd, North Vancouver 21. Pendulum Gallery 885 W Georgia St, Vancouver 22. The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Ct, North Vancouver 23. Reach Gallery Museum 32388 Veterans Way, Abbotsford 24. Remington Gallery 108 E Hastings St, Vancouver 25. Republic Gallery 732 Richards St, Vancouver 26. Richmond Art Gallery 7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond 27. Surrey Art Gallery UrbanScreen 13458 107A Ave, Surrey 28. Studio 730 730 Richards St, Vancouver 29. Terminal Creek Contemporary 569 Artisan Lane, Bowen Island 30. Trapp Projects 274 E 1st Ave, Vancouver 31. Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby St, Vancouver 32. Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre 50-950 West 41st Ave, Vancouver 33. VIFF Vancity Theatre 1181 Seymour St, Vancouver 34. Viridian Gallery 1570 Coal Harbour Quay, Vancouver 35. VIVO Media Arts Centre 2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver 36. West Vancouver Art Museum 680 17th St, West Vancouver 37. Wil Aballe Art Projects | WAAP 1129 E Hastings St, Vancouver

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


20

36

29

22

5

34

2

40 21 48 31 41 25 33

28

24 47

17

12

37

1

9

11

19

7 16

38

39

42 43

30 8 13 18 10 6

14 3 35

44

4

32

Arbutus Greenway

15

27 23

26 45 46


GALLERY INDEX

100 Braid St Art Studios & Gallery, p. 114 200-100 Braid St, New Westminster Access Gallery, p. 106 222 E Georgia St, Vancouver ARC Gallery, p. 116 1701 Powell Street, Vancouver Art Gallery at Evergreen, p. 82/118/124/140 1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam Audain Art Museum, p. 127/140 4350 Blackcomb Way, Whistler Back Alley Gallery Project, p. 138 2848 E 8th Ave, Vancouver Beaty Biodiversity Museum, p. 126 2212 Main Mall, Vancouver Beau Photo Supplies, p. 116 1401 West 8th Avenue Beaumont Studios, p. 115/124/129 316 W 5th Ave, Vancouver Burnaby Art Gallery, p. 84 6344 Deer Lake Ave, Burnaby Burrard View Fieldhouse, p. 95 545 North Slocan St, Vancouver Cartems Donuts, p. 98/139 2190 Main St, Vancouver Charles Clark Gallery @ Strange Fellows, p. 89 1345 Clark Dr, Vancouver Chernoff Fine Art, p. 92 265 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver The Cinematheque, p. 120 1131 Howe St, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, p. 48 555 Nelson St, Vancouver Deer Lake Gallery, p. 115 6584 Deer Lake Ave, Burnaby Equinox Gallery, p. 97/118 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver Fine Art Framing & Services, p. 87 100-1000 Parker St, Vancouver Franc Gallery, p. 101 1654 Franklin St, Vancouver Gallery Jones, p. 104/118 Unit 1–258 E 1st Ave, Vancouver grunt gallery, p. 44 116–350 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver Lights Out Space, p. 100 8930 Oak St, Vancouver Malaspina Printmakers, p. 91 1555 Duranleau St, Vancouver Massy Books, p. 114/126 229 E Georgia St, Vancouver Mónica Reyes Gallery, p. 86 602 E Hastings St, Vancouver Monte Clark Gallery, p. 93/119 525 Great Northern Way, Vancouver Museum of Vancouver, p. 96/114 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver

Native Education College, p. 115 285 E 5th Ave, Vancouver North Vancouver Distric Public Library, p. 79 1277 Lynn Valley Rd, North Vancouver Pendulum Gallery, p. 88/127 885 W Georgia St, Vancouver The Playground, p. 115 434 Columbia St, Vancouver The Polygon Gallery, p. 27/40/116/126/137 101 Carrie Cates Ct, North Vancouver READ Books, p. 126 Emily Carr University, 520 E 1st Ave, Vancouver Reach Gallery Museum, p. 75/76 32388 Veterans Way, Abbotsford Remington Gallery, p. 136 108 E Hastings St, Vancouver Republic Gallery, p. 94/114 732 Richards St, Vancouver Richmond Art Gallery, p. 77 7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, p. 125/135 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver SAD Mag Pop-up, p. 127 1050 E Hastings St, Vancouver Science World, p. 124 1455 Quebec St, Vancouver Surrey Art Gallery UrbanScreen, p. 80/125 13458 107A Ave, Surrey Studio 730, p. 102 730 Richards St, Vancouver Studio 884, p. 127 884 East Georgia Street Terminal Creek Contemporary, p. 90 569 Artisan Lane, Bowen Island Trapp Projects, p. 105 274 E 1st Ave Vancouver Art Gallery, p. 56/113/116 750 Hornby St, Vancouver Vancouver Convention Centre, p. 116 999 Canada Place, Vancouver Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, p. 78 50-950 West 41st Ave, Vancouver Vancouver Lipont Art Centre, p.129 4211 No 3 Rd, Richmond VIFF Vancity Theatre, p. 103 1181 Seymour St, Vancouver Viridian Gallery, p. 99 1570 Coal Harbour Quay, Vancouver VIVO Media Arts Centre, p. 52/128/129/139 2425 Kaslo St, Vancouver West Vancouver Art Museum, p. 85 680 17th St, West Vancouver Western Front, p. 120 Grand Luxe Hall 303 E 8 Ave, Vancouver Wil Aballe Art Projects | WAAP, p. 86 1129 E Hastings St, Vancouver

Nana Home Gallery, p. 116/120 1685 W 13th Ave, Vancouver

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

2019


ARTIST INDEX

Amalie Atkins p. 82/118/140

Greg Girard p. 93/119/124

Naveen Kishore p. 30/56

Diamond Point p. 35

Maria Varbanova p. 31

Cindy Baker p. 75

Mike Grill p. 87

Saul Leiter p. 97

Ryan Quast p. 83

Pavitra Wickramasinghe p. 81

Alan Bartol p. 81

Torrie Groening p. 91

Helen Levitt p. 97

Marissa Roth p. 78

Graeme Wahn p. 105

Christina Battle p. 22/112/119/120

Sunil Gupta p. 56

Michael Love p. 101

Paolo Rubini p. 103

Ryder White p. 95

Deanna Bowen p. 48/70/112/120

Ernst Haas p. 97

Alex MacKenzie p. 95

Nicolas Sassoon p. 80/125

Gerri York p. 91

Jim Breukelman p. 85

Ursula Handleigh p. 81

Vivian Maier p. 97

Susan Schuppli p. 22/112/119/120

Karen Zalamea p. 106

Harry Callahan p. 97

Adad Hannah p. 34/77

Joel Meyerowitz p. 97

Tejal Shah p. 56

Josema Zamorano p. 86

Blaine Campbell p. 94/114

Dana Hawkes p. 98/139

Elizabeth Milton p. 52/113

Evann Siebens p. 36

Roxanne Charles p. 62/96/114

Fred Herzog p. 97/119

Diego Minor p. 31

Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II p. 56

Nikhil Chopra p. 56

Julie F Hill p. 90

Dane Murner p. 89

Helen Shaw p. 127

Bali Chu-Mehrer p. 31

Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes p. 105

Pushpamala N p. 56/113

Alex Sikorsky p. 31

Lynne Cohen p. 84

Tom Hsu p. 29/70/118/127

Lisa g Nielsen p. 95

Umrao Singh Sher-Gil p. 56

Christos Dikeakos p. 92/122

Dan Jackson p. 102

James Nizam p. 104/119

Sydney Southam p. 95

Lindsay Dobbin p. 81

Hua Jin p. 68/99

Gordon Parks p. 97

Kali Spitzer p. 44/113/115

Anita Dube p. 56

Barrie Jones p. 100

Alana Paterson p. 26/70/118

Krista Belle Stewart p. 14/21/113/118

William Eggleston p. 97

Ranbir Kaleka p. 56

Stephanie Patsula p. 76

Kiran Subbaiah p. 57

Eshrat Erfanian p. 22/112/119

Sonia Khurana p. 56

DesirĂŠe Patterson p. 33

Vivan Sundaram p. 56

Jackie Franks p. 31

Taehoon Kim p. 79

Ryan Peter p. 91

Tyrese Temple p. 31

Noah Friebel p. 105

Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty p. 95

Birthe Piontek p. 32/70/113/119

Theo Terry p. 105

Gauri Gill p. 56

Zoe Kirk-Gushowaty p. 95

Nisha Platzer p. 95/129/139

Amanda Thomson p. 95

Gallery Index & Artist Index

158 – 159


Denise Ryner FAR BELOW AND FAR AWAY Curator Denise Ryner responds to a photo from the archives

The audience frames the photographer’s shot just as they once framed the unnamed parade route. Their relaxed, observational postures are mismatched with the abandoned litter and debris after a possible moment of recklessness minutes before. I imagine the photographer awkwardly leaning out from a similar crowd above, alternating between bouts of celebratory fervour and calm order. Instability is also echoed in the contrast between the overhead shot and the graphic strips of the lane markers and lines of dots formed by the soldiers’ white hats. Even the shadows of floral decorations seem intent on imprinting lightness on the marchers’ attempt to create an atmosphere of civic responsibility and import.

ideologies—whether read as heroic or oppressive— that such soldiers and displays were part of, across Canada and globally. Who is missing from these celebrations—who and what is unseen?

Denise Ryner is Director/Curator of the Or Gallery, Vancouver.

In the year Major James Skitt Matthews took this photo, my parents’ home island in the Caribbean was negotiating its independence from the British Empire. Did such a relaxed and celebratory atmosphere greet these processions there? The marching soldiers and parade-goers convey a visual grammar of the nation state and the military heritage of the British Empire in a post-war era. But outside the frame, it was also a moment when decolonial and independence movements were gaining momentum around the world.

The overhead perspective scales the marchers and onlookers down, reducing our susceptibility to the authority of the soldiers and the rifles resting easily across their shoulders. The distanced perspective also softens the connection to the histories and

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Major James Skitt Matthews, Bird's-eye view of soldiers in a parade, 1958, silver gelatin print, 7.5" × 9.4", City of Vancouver Archives

2019




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