This Halifax artwork present will make you rethink the {photograph}

When was the final time you thought of what {a photograph} might do? 

It seems like an esoteric query, notably when at a time when everyone seems to be carrying a excessive definition digital camera of their again pocket and the typical Canadian household has been photographed extra occasions than our first 18-ish Prime Ministers. But that is the question on the coronary heart of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s new exhibition, Conceptual Art & The Camera. In it, over a dozen photographs — many by no means seen earlier than by the general public — probe what pictures is, does, and may very well be.

For Alison Rossiter, it’s a query that first got here to thoughts in 1982, when she arrived as an teacher of pictures within the design division at NSCAD University. It was a “heady time of conceptual work in the air,” she says. Thanks to then-recent books exploring the which means and philosophical nature of pictures — like Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Allan Sekula’s Photography towards the grain — college students and college alike have been reconsidering their creative practices with their cameras. Rossiter was amongst them: she routinely photographed on a regular basis pictures like sponges and family items, in addition to the artwork provides in her studio. 

In Conceptual Art & The Camera, an early work by Rossiter hangs. It’s a easy shot of a field of Polaroid papers with a smudge within the higher righthand aspect of the body. Missed with chemical substances through the improvement course of, the smudge is sort of a tinged yellowish bruise on the picture’s edge. “I guess I didn’t really care about how square it was in the frame. I was just photographing it, probably for the lighting exposure,” she says. 

She’s a bit shocked it’s been included, as a result of she hasn’t seen it or actually thought of it in a long time, when the work was bought by conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson, who later donated it to the AGNS archive. “It’s just so beautiful: That flaw in the image would not have been there at the time, and I wouldn’t have known much about it at the time either,” she says. “But now, it is exactly what I pay attention to with old materials. It’s very funny to see this piece.” 

After her NSCAD days, Rossiter has made a reputation for herself creating expired photographic paper from way back to the 1910s: “I was finding abstractions made inside the paper packages without me doing anything to it other than developing them,” she explains. “I just wanted to see what time had done to this material that had been sitting in someone’s dark room for 60, 80, over 100 years.” She simply wrapped a solo present of those types of pictures on the New York gallery that represents her final month.

When David Diviney, senior curator of the AGNS, found Rossiter’s {photograph} within the gallery’s archive—alongside different works by these in NSCAD’s orbit throughout that point—a present started to emerge. 

“These are works in the permanent collection that were made during the 1960s and across the 1970s, at a time where artists are abandoning traditional approaches to art-making in favor of ideas as the essence of their work,” Diviney says. “So, we see this departure from the prevailing formal and material concerns that preceded… And artists were really questioning the very nature and social role of art and practice.” 

Diviney’s favorite piece within the present, although, isn’t one of many many images that captures efficiency artwork or a bit that performs with self-portraiture, like many works within the present are. It’s really a brief video, shot on a Super 8 digital camera, by the PEI-based artist Konrad Wendt. Called Car Hits Camera, the piece was created by laying the digital camera face-up on the centre line of Coburg Road in Halifax (the place NSCAD was situated on the time) and leaving it there, till it was run over. The piece, he says, “in a lot of ways, was where my research began: Looking at a way to share that work with the public, to provide a broader context around the work itself.”

Adds Diviney: “It comes back to really using the photograph and probing how it can support different types of meaning, different ways of storytelling, versus it being used to directly mirrorthe world around us.” For Rossiter, the function of pictures in fashionable life is a query she nonetheless thinks about—particularly since most of her work is about processing previous picture paper to make artwork. “The darkroom is the only place in the world where I feel like I know what I am doing,” she writes in an e-mail the day after a telephone interview with CBC. “Otherwise, I am at sea.”

Conceptual Art & The Camera runs on the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (1723 Hollis St.) in Halifax.