Resolution

by Jessica Morgun

The Saskatchewan Prairie Light festival is very much emerging as a biannual photography event, both in terms of its vision, and in its collaboration with artists, galleries, publications, and arts organizations—all of whom are enthusiastic about the festival’s contributions to photography in Saskatchewan.

PAVED Arts, the new media artist-run centre, born out of the two Saskatoon organizations The Photographers Gallery and Video Vérité, has been a longtime advocate and supporter of local artists with contemporary practices in photography. PAVED brings a conceptually rich addition to the 2016 festival with an exhibition of local Saskatoon photographers working in film photography, “Resolution,” curated by artistic director David LaRiviere. Shown in conjunction with other projects and exhibitions of the festival, “Resolution” demonstrates the impact that PAVED Arts has as a locale for critical dialogue and platform for artists to resource and showcase their work.

Bringing in artists from across the country and around the world to resource the local arts community is one of the pillars of PAVED Arts programming. “Without PAVED this show wouldn’t have happened,” says artist Karla Griffin. Griffin, Stephanie Norris and Barbara L. Reimer were brought together through a box camera workshop, led by Winnipeg artist Andrew John Milne and sponsored by PAVED Arts nearly two years ago. Milne’s box camera, a pinhole camera large enough to step into, not only began a conversation between LaRiviere and the three artists of this exhibition, but was also a site of furthering the artists’ conceptual interests in analog processes. LaRiviere describes PAVED Arts as a grassroots organization that seeks to connect local artists with the wider world through workshops, exhibitions of visiting artists’ space, production and access to technical equipment, as well as through critical dialogue. “The fact that [“Resolution”] has a grassroots impetus does not diminish what this exhibition is.”

Karla Griffin, whose practice is in film photography and drawing, used the phrase “success or failure is dependent upon perspective” as an axiom for her photographic installations. This phrase was, at least partially, formed by her encounter with Andrew John Milne’s box camera. Stepping into the box camera, Griffin began to think about perspective in photography and new ways she could engage viewers in her own photographic practice. This led her to experiment with installations that encouraged the viewer to take up the position that the photographer had once occupied. Roadrunner/Coyote, 2016, printed on medium density fiberboard and leaning against the wall on the floor, is an image of a dead coyote on the side of the road. A viewer might need to take the same kneeling position Karla had once occupied to best view the work. Pushover, 2016, an image of a crushed grain bin resembling the size and shape of a tin can, is hung high on the wall. Griffin constructed a staircase, roughly the height of her husband’s pickup truck, from which she took the image. As viewers ascend the staircase, they become unwitting performers, a spectacle to watch as one might watch a photographer taking an image of an unusual or mundane subject.

In both her images and installation techniques, Griffin directs the viewer to the found object or the found situation, none of which are terribly dramatic, especially to prairie dwellers. These found situations become not only darkly humorous, but worthy of attention. Her titles also assist in slowing down the viewer, encouraging one to take pause and consider how each instance is dependent upon perspective. Paved with Good Intentions, 2015, is a more traditionally displayed photograph of a closed sidewalk. Cut off by a snow fence and construction sign, this image uncovers a sense of the absurd in everyday city life. There is a certain amount of ambivalence imbued in these found situations that encourages a reflective distance—similar to the physical distance needed to capture a photographic image—that Griffin invites the viewer to participate in.

Barbara L. Reimer’s work, a diptych image of Saskatchewan sculptor Clint Neufeld’s studio and Reimer’s Volvo station wagon, was taken on 8×10 film, a time consuming process that requires a high level of expertise. These images are best seen as support material for a body of work initiated by a CARFAC mentorship with Clint Neufeld, where—among other forays into drawing and sculpture—Reimer used papermaking to create “skins” of the old Volvo. The two photographs titled 245 DL 2.1, 2015, (after the station wagon model) are shot documentary style, neither staged nor dramatic. The viewer is simply offered two views of a similar scene. Visual records of the nontoxic coffee processing Reimer used to develop these images, as well as a stray eyelash and bits of debris, communicates the physicality by which these images were produced. The 8×10 images were then scanned, enlarged, and digitally printed as they were, including rough borders and blemishes. As a technician at the University of Saskatchewan, Reimer is not only highly skilled in the darkroom; she is also a Photoshop expert. She describes her initial interest in analog as an escape from sitting in front of the computer. The sculptures Reimer produced based on her old Volvo parallels the documentary approach she brings to photography, demonstrating an attraction to the physicality that is evident even in a digital print. One only needs to imagine her trudging through Iceland (her most recent artist residency) with her large format camera to get a sense of the physical nature of her work.

Though physicality seems central to Reimer’s practice, David LaRiviere describes her content as the “presence of absence,” serious and austere, ruminating on disappearing things. This gives a haunting quality to Reimer’s work that walks the fine line between ephemeral and physical presence.

Unlike Karla Griffin and Barbara Reimer, who have both studied and worked at the University of Saskatchewan, Stephanie Norris is originally from England and has developed her practice outside of the University’s sphere of influence. She is also set apart in that her practice exists exclusively in the darkroom. Her series of four photograms embossed on rag paper, Saskatchewan Galaxies Volume I-IV, 2016, hang on the wall opposite Reimer’s work. For the most part the photograms read as abstract, with windows to subtle areas of recognizable images.

Compositionally unusual, there is a strong element of relinquished control in Norris’ work. She approaches each project like a series of repeated scientific experiments with strict control elements and one variable. The controls were drawings and paintings based on stars and galaxies transferred onto acetate. The variable – ice – blurred the source images as it melted, interacting with how the light contacts photosensitivity. These four black and white prints are the result of hundreds of experiments. Norris’ work is painterly and poetic, given a greater visual presence by the rag paper. LaRiviere notes that as with Reimer’s work, the content of Norris’ photograms is situated in the process itself. The result is not a direct visual reference to Saskatchewan’s expansive landscape, but brings to mind desolate and mystical topographies.

Karla Griffin, Barbara L. Reimer, and Stephanie Norris bring distinctive methods to their work and neither they, nor the curator, have attempted to put forward a “unified front.” Rather, LaRiviere states that “what animates the work in terms of curation is not that [it] strikes a specific chord, but that there are these contrasting approaches and sensibilities.” What is held in common stands firmly in the analog practices of photography and the darkroom.

In their only collaborative piece—the billboard atop PAVED arts and AKA artist run—the artists worked together to collage remnants of their own work (along with magazine fragments) and then digitally scanned and enlarged the composition, effectively summarizing a history of photography while also making a statement about the role that PAVED Arts has played in facilitating their work. The title of the billboard, Figure 9.12 Dots appear as a continuous line when the human eye can no longer differentiate between the spaces and the dots, 2016, was taken directly from a photography textbook: a label for a diagram demonstrating the concept of resolution. The dual meaning of word—both in terms of the quality of an image, and in terms of being at the end of something—brings to mind the unresolved paradoxes of in this new and problematic era of photography.

Bypassing analog versus digital clichés, the work in “Resolution” takes a more nuanced approach, and considers the photograph as an object itself; particular and resistant to replication.

“Resolution: Karla Griffin, Stephanie Norris and Barbara Reimer,” is on view at PAVED Arts, Saskatoon, from March 11-April 16, 2016.

---

 

Jessica Morgun is a visual artist, teacher, sometimes writer, and MFA student at the University of Saskatchewan.