Colin Smith: Obscure Inversions

1

Colin Smith RBC New Works Gallery Art Gallery of Alberta December 5, 2014 - March 1, 2015

2

Trocher Fire Lookout, 2009 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm

Dark Chambers: Colin Smith and the synthetic image By profession, Colin Smith is a lighting technician and set photographer for the motion picture industry. In conversation he explained the nature of his work: travelling from his home community of Calgary for contract projects, often to remote areas, to ‘spark’ a high-budget set. The process of manipulating the light for such projects involves expensive equipment to plot and assess the quality of available light, controlling it for the duration of the shoot to attain the most high fidelity and perfect image.

The control of light is achieved by reflecting and refracting it directionally, or obliterating a sub-par source and supplanting the existing lighting conditions with an artificial facsimile of the natural.

Smith is known for his ability to manipulate and shift light as a core tenant in the creation of an augmented reality; to suspend one’s doubt in the believability of a set, the lighting fundamentally transforms the quality of mood in an intangible environment.

3

His experience and technical acumen with big-budget, fancy photographic and cinema equipment and lighting gear, and all of the mechanizations they can achieve in the fabrication of an image, Smith’s explorations into the origins of photography began at home. He built a camera obscura in his daughter’s bedroom, and together they “sat for hours, watching suburban life play out inverted on the walls and ceiling.” 1 Thus began his artistic investigations into the elemental construction of a photographic image.

Colin Smith grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a place known as the ‘land of the living skies’, where the horizon and its line of shifting atmospheric qualities offer the most dramatic metamorphosis of the small prairie city. His family often took extended summer road trips, allowing Smith to explore the derelict prairie architecture of half-collapsed barns, decaying homestead outbuildings and long abandoned homes. As his artistic photography practice developed, Smith cites the markers of life from the past - small towns, vintage cars and “places left behind” - as sources of inspiration and physical traces of those that came before.

Smith began to produce analog photographic images and the works are a product of the most humble optical projection tricks and early imagemaking processes. The trace of light, when fixed with basic salts and chemicals on a paper, acts as a marker of time for Smith.

After those early moments, sharing the transfixing magic of the camera obscura effect in a family bedroom, Smith sought out camera obscuras in abandoned sites. He discovered that the vintage keyhole of a door in a dilapidated farmhouse created a perfect found camera obscura along the walls of the room, projecting a view of elongated trees and the exterior weathering natural forces across the vacant interior space. Smith began to document these found camera obscura images with large format cameras, printing the artwork image as a perfect encapsulation of both representations of past and present, interior and exterior spaces superimposed and fixed in a singular image.

4

Seebe, 2009 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm

These early experiments extended into a first body of work, images from found camera obscuras in vacant prairie outbuildings across Southern Alberta. Smith’s second series involved simple constructions of camera obscuras in more unusual locations. By masking the windows of vintage automobiles and holiday trailers, leaving a small aperture for an exterior view, he was able to transform and transparently conceal the curvilinear interiors with a vibrant inversion of an outdoor vista. Smith captured the inverse projections of an exterior reality on these decaying interiors, printing them in large-scale colour prints, at a scale where the body feels enveloped in the representation of these two dissonant realities.

The light travelling through a small hole in a darkened chamber, or camera, is the core principle of the most basic lens-based technologies.

The camera obscura was an early optical device discovered in China in approximately 400 BCE. It revealed a seemingly magical phenomenon

5

whereby light was transmitted from one area of a small enclosed box and an image was projected and inverted onto a similar but opposing space, presenting an upside down but otherwise intact image, true to its origins of colour and content.

Used as a creative tool in image-making since its discovery, the camera obscura has allowed for precision in perspectival drawing, architectural rendering and painting; expanding its principles with sophisticated timing shutters and lenses has led to the development of present-day camera and cinematic equipment.

Over time, Smith’s experiments in simple analogue photographic image making became even more protracted – he began making sun prints. By creating small pinhole cameras and affixing them to poles or structures in the existing environment, he allowed the sun, over time, to burn an image on the photo paper, documenting an extremely long exposure of a landscape in a singular fixed image. This technique represents his interest in capturing the impact of durational time, in essence a moving image, in one static frame using the simplest formula: an open aperture and the sun itself.

The aperture, or opening chasm which lets light in over a specific duration, has the potentiality to alter our perception of the real – of how we see what exists beyond ourselves. Ontologically speaking, the aperture or opening associated with the photograph represents an ultimate paradox, according to Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: The same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of… the astonishment of “that-has-been” [and] will also disappear. It has already disappeared…2

6

Barthes continues in describing the intimacy of testifying –proving that something existed as a visible truth– and experiencing the singularity and fragility of duration in the photographic image as an act of love, a temporal, unfixable state subject to the ravages of an ultimately “indifferent Nature”.3 Our attempts at preserving the experience of duration, of what happens within the dimensionality of time, be it a moment in a bedroom with a child that an artist loves, the view from an abandoned farmhouse window, or the vacant and vast bedding of a luxury hotel is a only a ‘third’ representation destined to decay into the fallacy of the past.

The intimacies and sense of futility underlying such nostalgic settings of Smith’s early works – the landscape viewpoints and domestic spaces – led to the development of a new series of camera obscura photographs: the hotel room series. This body of work, represented in Colin Smith: Obscure Inversions, is a study of Western Canadian hotel room environments, with inverted obscura projections of the picturesque holiday landscape overlaid across the meticulously decorated bedding, wallpapered surfaces and classic settees.

Each of the hotels Smith selected has an overtone of colonial style and a Euro-centric ideal of luxury: many of the hotels he documented were built during an era of expansion and railway investment in Western Canada. The Prince of Wales Hotel, the Hotel MacDonald, and Hotel Vancouver were all constructed between the World Wars by railway companies to lure tourists along a new route. With a similar design of a potent castle-like revivalist architecture, the hotels were appealing to the British Empirical resort experience that was desired by a bourgeoning tourism industry at that particular point in time. These historic hotels possess hundreds of rooms oriented towards the idealized view: chambers with an aperture focussed on a city shifting in its periphery, towards an urbanity encroaching upon the very vistas once possessed by these majestic hotel rooms.

The hotel room itself is a contradiction of intimacy and commonality. It is a private space to be booked for rest and repose while simultaneously a common space used by many over decades, sometimes for business 7

Hotel MacDonald (detail), 2014 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm

Prince of Wales Hotel, 2013 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm

and sometimes for pleasure. Photographed by Smith, hotel spaces are presented as lonely yet full of potential: the bedding is undisturbed and waiting, there are no personal objects or identifying baggage of the individual in the underlying mise-en-scène. These hotel rooms are an archetypal set for the theatricality of the view from a window we cannot see, yet due to the exacting phenomenon of Smith’s room-sized camera obscuras, we are simultaneously able to experience these alluring landscapes bathed as an inverse light across the rooms’ interior spaces.

Described by Bruce Grenville in Grand Hotel, a monographic survey on this particular architectural space in relation to contemporary art, the hotel is more than just a setting for staged human experiences.

Because hotels are sites of temporality and transition, we rarely contemplate the nuanced effects of their spaces… Yet they

10

leave a strong imprint on us. We are seduced by the inherent possibilities within them.4 The implied intimacy or potentiality of the human experience and its trace on a physical space is alluded to in the hotel series of images presented by Smith: his works are now presenting future possibilities rather than transcribing, vis-à-vis the photographic print, a nostalgic trace of what once existed. The synthetic image, man-made and constructed in its essence as the attempt to afix light and the human experience of a moment onto something as transient as paper, invokes an invented encoding of an image, which Jacques Rancière describes as “a principle of reversible equivalence between the silence of images and what they say.”5 Photography did not become an art because it employed a device opposing the imprint of bodies to their copy. It became one by exploiting the double poetics of the image, by making its images, simultaneously or separately, two things: the legible testimony of a history written on faces or objects and pure blocks of visibility, impervious to any narrativization, any intersection of meaning.6 Smith states he is “communicating modern stories” via the low-tech origins of photography. The visibility beyond narrative occurs precisely in the act of superimposition: whereby one image is overlaid or placed on top of another image as a simple animation for the eye to discover what is revealed and concealed in a singular glance. With the superimposition of the outside view projected and inverted omnipresent over the hotel room camera obscura, the viewer’s imagination is able to construe relationships between the interiors and an upside-down world as a single-framed cinema: an anaglyph of the dark chambers of the mind.

Kristy Trinier Curator, Art Gallery of Alberta

11

Empress Hotel, 2013 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm

Endnotes 1 Quoted in Christine Klassen Gallery, Exposure Photography Festival, 2011.

2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.

Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 93 -94.

3 Ibid.

4 Jennifer M. Volland, Bruce Grenville, Stephanie Rebick, ed. Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013), 12.

5 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 11.

6 Ibid.

12

Artist Biography Originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Colin Smith attended the Alberta College of Art. Currently residing in Calgary, Alberta, Smith’s current work employs the traditional optical technique of the camera obscura to create compelling images with dramatic light, saturated colour and symbolic juxtaposition. His work is represented in numerous private, corporate and public collections, including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Smith’s work has been featured in publications such as Canadian Art and Preview Magazine. In 2012, he was invited to present a lecture for the Artist in Conversation with Curators series at the Leighton Art Centre. Smith was also the winner of the 2013 Cenovus Energy Art Competition.

Writer Biography Kristy Trinier is a Curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She previously was the Public Art Director at the Edmonton Arts Council, where she managed the City of Edmonton’s Public Art Collection, as well as related exhibitions and public art programs. Trinier holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and English from the University of Victoria, and a Master’s degree in Public Art from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI, ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) as a Huygens scholar in The Netherlands.

13

List of Works Vancouver Hotel, 2013 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

Granville Hotel, 2013 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

Hotel MacDonald, 2014 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

Untitled, 2014 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

Prince of Wales Hotel, 2013 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

Untitled, 2014 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

Empress Hotel, 2013 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

The Animator, 2014 Zoetrope camera obscura sculpture 91.44 x 60.96 x 182.88 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

Regis Hotel, 2009 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery Palliser Hotel, 2009 Acrylic mount photograph 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

14

The RBC New Works Gallery features new works by Alberta artists. Initiated in 1998 and named the RBC New Works Gallery in 2008, this gallery space continues the Art Gallery of Alberta’s commitment to supporting Alberta artists.

Š Art Gallery of Alberta 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77179-011-6 Editor: Catherine Crowston Design: Cut+Paste Design Inc. and Charles Cousins Photography: Colin Smith Essay: Kristy Trinier Printing: Burke Group Printed in Canada

The Art Gallery of Alberta is grateful for the generous support of our many public and private donors and sponsors, as well as the ongoing support of the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Front Cover Image Vancouver Hotel, 2013 Acrylic mount photograph, 121.92 x 152.4 cm Courtesy of Peter Robertson Gallery

15

16