Part One: Ash Barbu and Deirdre Logue in Conversation

Recess, Cultural Production, Checking Out

Deirdre Logue, Home Office, 2017, 03:33 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and Vtape.

By Ash Barbu

Ash Barbu is a writer and curator based in Ottawa, Ontario. Deirdre Logue is a film, video, and installation artist and cultural worker based in both Toronto and Brighton, Ontario. They first met during the research phase of the group exhibition Empty History, presented at Vtape from November 20 – December 14, 2019. Curated by Barbu, Vtape’s 2019 Researcher-in-Residence, Empty History explored the ways in which artists use video to interrupt narratives of so-called ‘queer progress.’ Alongside contributions by Paul Wong (Vancouver, BC) and Lucas Michael (New York, NY), the exhibition featured Logue’s Home Office (2017). Shot on location during a residency at The Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, the work consists of a single-shot, 3:33 minute recording of the artist attempting to balance on top of a slide-out shelf from a wooden writing desk.

Home Office does not seek to repair the unjust and the uncertain by fashioning new utopias. Offering performances of solitary, inoperative gestures and activities, the works of Empty History construct impossible narratives without purpose or end, carried out at the limits of what is deemed recognizably ‘queer’ or ‘political’ content. In this refusal of resolution and finality, they occupy the difficult space in between meaning and dysfunction, acting out and stepping back, and seeking change and giving up. Within the frame of the screen, life itself is presented in a fixed state.

Barbu and Logue met on August 27, 2021, and again on November 19, 2021, to reconnect for the first time since the presentation of Empty History. In this two-part discussion article, the artist and curator consider personal changes that have taken shape over the past year and a half, including Barbu’s shifting creative practice and Logue’s decision to move away from the city. Together, they discuss feeling stuck, checking out, and moving on.

Ash Barbu: It’s nice to see you. I know that we planned on meeting earlier this summer. Life got in the way of that. I’m feeling somewhat rested, having just returned from Vancouver.

Deirdre Logue: I don’t know if you know where I am, but I left Toronto. I moved away to a hobby farm just north of Brighton, Ontario. It’s about an hour and a half from the city. My partner Allyson and I sold our house in Parkdale.

AB: I would love to hear about it.

DL: In some ways, what has transpired over the past year and a half will help us continue the conversations we started during your research residency at Vtape. We could continue to talk about doing nothing as a form of something. We could also talk about why no one is doing anything when we need to do more—more about other things other than this preoccupation with the self and the relative notions that surround the self, particularly in the context of an art career or a studio practice.

I love the idea of talking about recess, the kind we are introduced to as elementary students, as a moment of release from a regime known as education. Once we are outside of the classroom, what are those moments of freedom supposed to mean? Are they supposed to help us extend our servitude and fulfill the expectation that we [should] be productive? Or are they moments to teach us that we can be free? I don’t know. But I loved recess. You’re allowed time to experience something other than the system that you are stuck with, or, as is true for most people, perfectly content with in some kind of way. Your trapped-ness can feel good, right? So, during recess, you’re exercising a muscle within this system, asking: Can I move freely between absence and presence? Am I in or am I out?

At my new house, I have wild guinea fowl. There is always one that, when you set it free, just runs back into the cage. It huddles in the corner without any real desire to be free. And then there’s one that’s always fucked off, at risk of being killed. But it’s been in the cage too long. It has no skills for the wild. My desire is to protect them from being wild things because being wild things means they’re part of a system that I can’t control.

What you and I started talking about in 2019 has, in a way, led me to leave the city. It has led me to question the role that artists can play in providing respite for other artists, at a distance from some of the frameworks that both force us into production and expect us to do more with less. Two years ago, we started looking for a place where I could put up a tent and stop freaking out. Allyson and I found a house that had been on the market for a while. We realized that this would be a tectonic move. But being here has bought us a very sweet and extended recess from a routine that we were starting to feel trapped in—both of our commutes to work were becoming more like a demolition derby, with buildings coming down and condos going up all around us. Toronto is in a constant state of destruction. It was starting to affect me. Navigating those stresses within the context of climate change, I just couldn’t reconcile it anymore. I couldn’t live with so many people living in such deep denial.

Since we got the house last August, we’ve set up a bunch of systems. We heat our house with wood. We have water recovery systems. We have chickens and eggs and a giant garden that we eat from almost exclusively. And we renovated and reconstituted a woodshop that acts as the site for an experimental studio program called FAR (Feminist Art Residency). Imagine FAG (Feminist Art Gallery) shifting to feminist land art meets community of care. We’re not totally off the art grid. We’re hybridizing the idea of stepping off the treadmill and stepping onto a different kind of path.

AB: As you know, I have long fantasized about moving on and checking out, too. We share that. When we met at Vtape, I was just coming to terms with my fragmented work life and my decision to walk away from more grad school. We spoke about burnout and queer failure. Today, we’re speaking about choosing recess from the art world. Perhaps we can start to think about recess as a modality, as a means of open experimentation, without any determinate end or outcome—recess as unbecoming.

Deirdre Logue, Home Office, 2017, 03:33 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and Vtape.

DL: At school, during recess, you’re also in a panic state—you’ve only got a short amount of time. It’s very Pavlovian. The bell rings and you all run outside. The bell rings again and you all run back in. We forget how much we have been trained to be trapped, trained to have difficulty making decisions about freedom.

I think it’s important for us to take time to find forms of recess, not abscess, and try to challenge ourselves as humans, as artists, to examine the systems within which we work and decide whether or not they work for us.

I’m not suggesting that we all need to drop out of the artworld. Nor am I suggesting that we spend any more time deconstructing notions of what art is or can be. What I do think about is our personal accountability to the idea of being a cultural producer and what it is that we allow or ignore in order to see our own cultural productions surface and survive while others are made invisible. I think it’s important for us to take time to find forms of recess, not abscess, and try to challenge ourselves as humans, as artists, to examine the systems within which we work and decide whether or not they work for us.

Oh, I see a fox. It’s actually not a good thing. Hang on one second, please.

AB: Is everyone okay?

DL: Yes. Well, not really. I mean, we had six chickens, now we have two. We had ten guineas, now we have four. We are definitely guests here.

AB: How do you strike a balance with the wildlife?

DL: I suppose you get a dog. Dogs and foxes have a common language. Our friends lent us their dog, and I watched what Clarence did. Now, I’ve been marking territory like he does. Observing and assessing is truly the hard part.

AB: In 2019, we spoke about grant writing in the culture industry as a means to an end. On the farm, life moves with a different rhythm. You are observing minor tragedies, making the decision not to intervene every single time.

DL: I’m distracted by the fox. Can I call you back?

AB: Yeah, why don’t you?

Deirdre calls back in 15 minutes. After reconnecting, she takes me on a virtual tour of her farm using her laptop camera.

DL: I want to invite you to come here and do a writing residency, or non-writing residency, or resting residency, or any number of experimental versions of a residency that would be perfectly suited for you right now in your life. As we develop this program, we’re using people’s experiences of residencies that they didn’t enjoy as a guide.

AB: It’s such a generous invitation.

DL: Look at your calendar. We want to encourage guests to use the farm as an open, unrestricted space. We just did the Witch Institute, an academic conference produced by Queen’s University in collaboration with the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. What is the opposite of an online conference? An outside conference, I suppose. So, we held an opening ceremony and introduced three projects made by people that are part of our ongoing life relationships.

Syrus Marcus Ware is making a garden of future Blackness. With our friend Tracy Tidgwell, we produced a 250-foot-wide meditation walk through the five points of a pentagram (love, connection, grief, accountability, healing, love, etc.). We also invited the FASTWÜRMS, who performed a live raku firing about death and wonder. As senior witches, they had the showstopper. A lot of the people that visited had been working in isolation for a year and a half. It was very moving to see everyone together, outside, reconnecting, as if emerging from a chrysalis or something.

Deirdre Logue, Home Office, 2017, 03:33 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and Vtape.

AB: I wanted to speak with you about process, non-productivity, and worklessness—in short, how we might begin to reject conventional measures of art world success, choosing something other than desperation and burnout. I think we’ve done that in our own way.

DL: Everything needs a reconnect, and that’s what we did today. How are we doing? What are we doing? Where are we in the world? There are other questions that connect us as well—questions that were revealed to us when we first met during your residency. And to me, that’s a form of kinship. I do find your proposals compelling. I’m also compelled to speak again so that we might manifest something tangible that could be useful to you as a curator, useful to me as an artist, or useful to other curators and artists. Maybe more so than just me running around the house after a fox.

Read part two of the discussion here.

Parameters and Play: A Conversation with Neah Kelly

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Neah Kelly. Fodder for Fun series (SRRTt no. 2), recycled screenprint, paper sculpture, thread, plexiglass, 5″ x 6″ x 4″, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Harper Wellman

Neah Kelly is a visual artist currently based in Hamilton, Ontario. After earning her undergraduate degree from Concordia University, Kelly continued her formal education at Indiana University, finishing her MFA in 2018. Today, Kelly’s practice involves working within a self-imposed set of limitations, creating both 2D and 3D pieces. Using imagined shapes, Neah configures the shapes into various forms, again and again, in new and exciting ways. The completed works inspire new shapes, and the process is repeated. Within these parameters, Neah has found a sense of play in her practice leading to a portfolio of closely related but ever-evolving work, reflecting the chaos, beauty, and joy that can co-exist within a creative invention.

Could you please tell us a little bit about your personal history and your history in regards to art exposure, education, and career. Who or what led you down the path to being a visual artist? Who were some of your early artistic influences? 

I’m originally from Vancouver Island, growing up in a very small town (with just one intersection) called Shawnigan Lake. I am and was raised a Baha’i, attending a Baha’i boarding school for all of my high school years. These experiences, I think, set the tone for how I view the world and why I became an artist. Both of my parents are in the arts (my dad is a painter, and my mom is a musician), so it was natural to make art. We were raised looking and talking about my dad’s paintings and playing music with my mom. I really think it was the most natural thing for me to end up doing.

I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t exposed to art, or when that first exposure was. My dad used to make these very large-scale hard-edge abstract paintings with only two colours. I remember one that was huge, it took up almost the entire length of our living room wall, and it was comprised of a shape that as a child reminded me of a whale. It was blue and black, flat with no depth, just very crisp, clean edges between the shapes. I remember constantly looking at that painting, even when I was really little, it had an impact on me. Besides that, I used to love looking at my dad’s art books, two books that I looked at a lot were by Rodin (his bronze sculptures), and Rothko. Artists that I think were early inspirations for me were people like Kandinsky, Rothko, and Frankenthaler (their use of colour and colour as an expression of the spiritual really interested me), and Eva Hesse. Hesse is wonderfully strange. She has such an engrossing talent with materiality and just seems to be truly creative. I loved that. I love that her work is so full of creative energy, experimentation, and a visceral reaction that you can almost feel through photographs. I’ve only seen a couple of her pieces in real life, and it was worth the anticipation!

Eventually, I went to art school, and started with the visual arts program at Camosun College in Victoria, then attended Concordia University in Montreal, earning a BFA in Studio Art, with a minor in Print Media. While at Concordia, I was able to learn a lot about printmaking and bookbinding, and I think that’s where my art practice started to develop into what it is now. I started doing a lot of lithography and bookbinding, primarily playing with less conventional forms of bookbinding. After undergrad, I attended Indiana University in the US and earned an MFA in Printmaking. I graduated in 2018 and since then have been exhibiting across the US and Canada, participating in residencies, etc. This year I have shows coming up in Hamilton, ON, at Centre[3] and a two-person show at Martha Street Studio in Winnipeg, MB.

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Neah Kelly. fodder for fun: step 1a & accompanying form MIAAS no. 1, lithograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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Neah Kelly. fodder for fun: step 1a & accompanying form MIAAS no. 1, lithograph / recycled lithograph, paper sculpture, thread, 38cm x 27.9cm / 6″ x 4″ x 5″, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Your practice today is centered around ideas of play, as you continually play with a series of imagined shapes again and again. Play is something many people can connect with from their childhood. When did you rediscover this sense of play within your practice, or was it always there?

When I began this current body of work, making use of rules was there from the very beginning. And I don’t think I connected rules to play and play to creativity until a while later. For me, rules have played a huge part in my personal life. I’ve lived with type 1 diabetes for almost 24 years. Although it was an unconscious translation into my art practice, I think learning to function within strict parameters is something that has been a huge component of my daily life for almost as long as I can remember. So, initially creating a premise like this for a project didn’t seem unique in any way or that it would potentially lead to anything in the future. It was more that this type of thinking was just a way of existing in the world that I am familiar with.

But, the play aspect, or realizing that play was an important aspect in my work, I think, began to evolve as my process did. I see the idea of play as a way to generate ideas, and the rules establish a criteria and set of parameters guiding that play and what I’m doing/producing. When I was completing my MFA I read a lot about play and games, and game theory, and at first I saw rules as being really important, but the more I read and learned and thought about what I was doing and how I was thinking about things, I realized that really everything I was doing fit very neatly into game theory, and how children often play. The play of children is so cool. It’s imaginative, the rules are flexible, they change and develop as the game goes on. The rules are most often used to establish an objective, but they also serve the purpose of maintaining the play and allowing the play to continue for as long as possible. I realized that this was very similar to how I was using rules as a way to continue the action of creative invention. Through this research, I learned that play has huge impacts on our ability later in life to form friendships, establish intimacy or not, ethics of fairness and justice and establishing relationships. And all of these attributes are developed through rules and play, ultimately you can’t have play without rules. And rules very often (if you’re open to it) can lead to play.

In line with that thinking, the first project that really used this idea was a book project that I completed in my first year of grad school. It was an absurdly shaped small book (4” x 4” x 9”) that used three repeating shaped copper plates as its imagery. They have unique qualities that I intentionally gave them so that there was room to come up with a variety of compositions, but it was still a huge challenge! The book has about three hundred prints, and one of my rules was that all the prints that I printed had to be included in the book — successful or not. Without the safety of an editing process, the pressure for creative invention was high, it was another prompt! The objective was that with these constraints, I would be forced to invent original compositions within this framework again and again. The theory being that I would never run out of new compositions if I actually succeeded in stimulating and prompting creativity. In the end, these restraints acted as a stimulus for creative solutions, and the activity that I was engaged in during this process was play, and that’s how I got to the idea of play. From there, the broader realization of my practice is about the creative impulse, stimulating and generating it through activities, devices, projects, so that we can all engage in playful activities, seemed to come about naturally. It felt like an explosion of possibility, with my results becoming more absurd, abstract, and silly, with every iteration and subsequent generation.   

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Neah Kelly. FFF series: Peekaboo no. 1 (BBB …V), recycled drawing, hand-cut/hand-sewn paper sculpture, paper cut-outs, thread, coloured acrylic, 6” x 4” x 6”, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Are you able to elaborate on what initially informed the imagined shapes, and what they have come to mean or symbolize for you since working with them?

The first time I used these shapes was for the book project that kicked off this entire body of work, and when I started that project, I created those shapes with the explicit purpose of them being abstract. When I started I had goals in mind: I wanted the shapes to be different scales, and I wanted them to be truly abstract (or as much as possible) so that they would be hard to anthropomorphize, additionally I wanted them to have interesting and differing parts like angles, lines with dips, sharp edges, rounded corners, curves, notches, and uneven planes so that when these shapes interacted over and over again in the book, I would be able to create a unique and interesting composition with each print. I invented them through a process of formal consideration, and I settled on the shapes I ended up with when I thought they had the features that I was looking for, I thought they’d work well together, and I liked how they looked aesthetically.

I don’t really think of them as symbolizing anything. For me, the shapes were initially a tool to accomplish an idea –  the idea of perpetuating creativity from a restricted set of source material. Now that they have gone through so many translations and have been used in a multitude of consecutive projects, I think of them more as idea generators. That’s their function, that’s what they do but they’ve also come to mean just that for me: they are the prompters for my own imagination.

Where do you see your practice going in the future? Will your series continue, or is there something different in the works?

It is continuing, but it’s always changing. I’m currently working on an artist book that will be pretty interactive. I’m trying to create it in a way that people can handle it gently and participate more fully. The way things are progressing right now, I have pieces in the same vein that I am still creating, but I also have a couple projects that take these ideas but are more outward-looking and more active in soliciting viewer engagement. I really love the idea of working together at bolstering up our imagination skills, and I think that’s where my future projects are headed.

And in the same vein of more participatory projects, I have a collaboration in the works where we plan to use rules to dictate exactly what we make. And those rules will have a much more direct relationship with our personal lives and lived experience. This will be a project that begins with just two of us, and hopefully — through the use of social media — it will grow into a much more expansive, participatory practice.

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Neah Kelly. Fodder for Fun: Belled Butt Becomes …Visage no. 5, recycled screenprint, hand-cut/hand-sewn paper sculpture, thread, coloured acrylic, 10” x 10” x 6”, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Regarding the broader art scene, what do you see on the horizon, and what are some issues you feel the art community needs to address? Can you think of any artists or organizations that are helping the arts community move forward?

Diversity, and equal representation throughout power structures within the broader arts community. Recently, I’ve been thinking about who the gatekeepers in the art world are, who decides whose art, where it’s shown, and what type of content is presented and highlighted. It’s not enough to diversify the artists making art, we need to have boards, curators, directors, and leadership that are reflective of our communities. Shifting these power dynamics, and not simply having white boards showing POC artists, but POC communities determining the content and the conversations that we’re ultimately having within the art world is where I think the art world needs to move and is going. A few institutions that I’ve seen actively changing and diversifying their organizing bodies are Open Space in Victoria, BC; Martha Street Studio in Winnipeg, MB; and Trestle artist-run center in New York.

Finally, how can we all incorporate a little more play into our lives?

I don’t know exactly. I think for adults, play is more an attitude than a set thing. If there’s one thing I learned when researching play amongst animals and children, it’s really that anything anywhere can be considered play. One thing that I’ve observed about myself is that rules, deadlines, constraints, bribing, etc. turn really anything into a game. Set a time limit, something that you need to accomplish in a certain way, and it really does turn into a game instead of a chore. I think that combined with a more relaxed attitude, a healthy and robust sense of humour would definitely succeed in incorporating a little more play into our daily lives. The same goes for art, hobbies, anything really. That’s just what I think. Play is incredibly diverse and unique to the individual —there’s no right or wrong way to do it.

Check out more of Neah Kelly’s work on her website and Instagram.

The Poetic Everyday: In Conversation with Natalie Hunter

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Natalie Hunter. Staring Into The Sun. Solo exhibition at Rodman Hall Arts Centre. Hansen Gallery. 2019. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

Questions by Adi Berardini

Natalie Hunter’s work brings the everyday experience into a wondrous technicolour world, where the present moment meets that of memory. Bridging photography, sculpture, and installation, photos of interior domestic spaces are re-imagined through a kaleidoscope of colours, cyan meeting magenta, yellow and violet. She often produces experiential installations using photographs on transparent film, light, and other fragile materials that engage with the poetics of time, memory, perception, and the senses.

Natalie holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor of Art in Visual Art with a Concentration in Curatorial Studies from Brock University. She has shown her work in Canada and the United States in numerous exhibitions, including Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Centre 3 for Print and Media Arts, Art Gallery of Windsor, Hopkins Centre For the Arts at Dartmouth College, Museum London, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, and the Hamilton Supercrawl. She is the recipient of several awards including an Ontario Arts Council Creation Project Grant, and a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant.

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Natalie Hunter. The sky seemed to fold in ribbons of palest sunlight. 2017. Giclee prints on transparent film, poplar, light. installation dimensions variable. 12” x 72” each print. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

It seems like your work facilitates a “looking closer” since it often uses colour and layering of translucent images until they are nearly rendered abstract. Can you speak more about the conceptual ideas in your work and your process? How does it relate to perception and memory?

Natalie Hunter: My practice is multidisciplinary and concerned with the transformation of materials, objects, and images in ways that evoke an emotive or psychological response in the viewer. I often make images and installations and think of myself as a sculptor who fell in love with images. I’m interested in process and materials just as much as concepts. The starting point for most of my work boils down to light and time, both of which can be experienced differently through image and sculpture. I’m interested in really ephemeral things like light, air, memory, the senses, motion, stillness, and time. Things we can feel the effects of, how they shape experience, and how these concepts can be articulated in material ways. I very much look at photographs as material fluid things that are tangible objects vulnerable to the elements. I find sculpture and photography related in some way. There is an element of stillness in sculpture and photography that speaks to the present moment, but also the past. The negative and positive aspects of photography mirror that of sculpture and casting—both are traces just in different ways.

I’m really interested in the exploratory, transformative power of materials to translate these experiences of the everyday.

For the past seven or eight years, I’ve been working with layering images both physically (layering transparent photographs to make new images and spaces), and inside of the camera (multiple exposures). I find this act of layering both inside and outside of the camera transcends logical ideas of time. For me, the act of layering images subverts expected notions of a perfect photographic image and notions of linear time. I use layering in an attempt to connect with the processes of human memory. Layering both accumulates and loses information, and this is what happens as we accumulate memories, sensory information, and thoughts over time. Detail is lost, while sensation is accentuated.

When making images, I use colour filters to bring attention to these layers. They help me slow down and separate different moments of time while leaving clues as to how the images were made. I choose combinations of colour filters emotively; choosing colours that naturally occur in the spaces I occupy to further accentuate them. Colour is sensorial in the visual sense. I believe that the addition of colour heightens awareness. When I think about the strongest earliest memory that I have, I can’t identify details, but I can describe the sensations, and for me adding colour through the use of filters is a way of exploring sensation or sensory information through photography. In this way, I hope to make a predominantly visual medium physical.

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Natalie Hunter. Helios (interior day view). Hand-applied dichroic film on window, light. variable dimensions. 2019. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

  You take photographs of what may seem ordinary or mundane, like the interior blinds and curtain shots in As the Light Touches and create something quite awe-inspiring and vibrant. Can you speak more about the transforming of everyday, familiar spaces?

NH: Artists should make work about their experience and how they perceive and understand the world. The mundane experiences we find ourselves in on a daily basis are often those in-between moments that we don’t really count as experiences. I’m really interested in the exploratory, transformative power of materials to translate these experiences of the everyday. Memory is just as important as breathing in our human experience and I’m interested in exploring how that manifests and transforms through time. I feel like we are all unconsciously shaped by the spaces we inhabit on a daily basis, and I know that my work is often influenced by the spaces I spend the most time in. Space is something psychological just as much as it is physical, and I want to explore both of these aspects of space in my work.

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is a text that I return to a lot. It has been influential in how I understand my work and its relationship to space, time, and memory. We participate daily in the creation of spaces we unconsciously make for ourselves. I don’t wish for my work to merely represent these spaces, but instead, act as experiences in and of themselves that become new spaces and encounters in their own right.

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Natalie Hunter. Helios (interior day view). Hand-applied dichroic film on window, light. variable dimensions. 2019. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

Your work seems to incorporate the surrounding architecture of the space it occupies. For example, your installation Helios at the Rodman Hall Art Centre, a site-responsive piece that addresses the ephemeral qualities of light and how it affects familiar spaces, the body, and our perception. I was wondering what your process is like in terms of creating work that is more site-specific?

NH: I don’t like to ignore the space my work exists in. I try to consider the space it exists in at the time of exhibition as an element of the work itself. Often, my work changes when it’s installed a second or third time, or from my studio to the gallery space. I need to do site visits when thinking about site-specific work, and I usually respond in an emotive way that speaks to a unique characteristic of a space in order to converse with it. Memory plays a big part in this. When responding to a space site-specifically, I hope to produce a kind of encounter between viewer and work that elicits memory or a sensorial response.   

Helios was a site-responsive installation at Rodman Hall Art Centre exhibited in my solo exhibition Staring into the sun. When making Helios, I wanted to consider it a gesture, response, or conversation with Rodman Hall; a connecting work that bridges outside and inside and only exists for a short time in the space. I was really influenced by my memories and experiences of Rodman Hall as a student. I remember ascending the stairs and seeing the stained glass, which is located in various locations in Rodman Hall’s domestic spaces. I wanted to converse with these architectural elements while at the same time make something new. Something that made you more aware of time, your body, and the space you exist in a very present, albeit slow, way. Change and fluidity are important to this work. And the work took on its own life as winter stretched to spring and the light changed.

I think Helios points to the process of how I create images and think with materials. I spent about a little over a month playing with samples of dichroic film, doing material research, finding out what it does in different lighting conditions, bending, folding, layering, and draping it in various situations, and mixing it with different materials. A lot of my inquiries stem from testing materials to see what they will do. Helios is much about slow movement, the slowness of time, and how we perceive it through our human senses. I hope to continue exploring what I learned in making this work.

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Natalie Hunter. The Sun’s Rays Do Not Burn Until Brought To A Focus. Installation at Centre 3 For Print and Media Arts, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. 2018. Documentation courtesy of the artist. 

Q: Your installation The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus creates a “temporal experience for the viewer since as the sun moves across the sky, each work is animated with their own ephemeral rhythm.” I was wondering if you could speak more about this work and the use of natural processes, light and time?

NH: I use light in the making of images, but also physically in how they are exhibited and exist within space. For me, light is quite kinetic or makes the work kinetic through the passage of time. There is both stillness and subtle motion in my installation The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus, achieved through different uses of artificial and natural light. I use light in this installation as a material that activates spaces.

Light is fundamental to photography, and I consider its manipulation as a material process in my work. Light is also fundamental to sculpture because it is how we are able to situate and perceive objects in space. Light is ephemeral, like time and memory. Natural sunlight is always changing, where as artificial light is static. In The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus, natural sunlight is used in a kinetic way, gallery lighting is used in a rather still way, which casts latent imagery on the surfaces of the exhibition space. A viewer’s experience of the work is not static but always changing. Elements move with the subtlety of the air movement in the space, and the installation seems different on a cloudy day, or between dawn and dusk.

It’s hard to discuss photography without discussing time because time is so essential to the medium. Photography is always seen as a frozen moment, but for me, photographs are fluid things. A lot of my transparent film works require active movement in the space that they occupy in order to experience them. The light activates them, but the viewer does through movement too. For example, in The sky seemed to fold in ribbons of pales sunlight, it appears different when standing at different points in the room. When standing directly in front of the piece, the physical images almost disappear, and you only see latent imagery on the walls. When standing at an angle, the images appear layered with themselves and the latent imagery on the walls. You aren’t sure what the true image is; the physical photograph or its latent reflection.

Q: Who are some artists that are influential to you and your practice?

NH: A lot of the artists I admire often explore quiet and overlooked elements of our being and how they shape experience. I look to artists like Tacita Dean, Uta Barth, James Welling, Sabine Hornig, and Sarah VanDerBeek for their consideration of materiality in lens-based image making. I feel a kinship to artists like Ann Hamilton, Roni Horn, Kimsooja, and Alison Wilding for their conceptual and material research, and multidisciplinary approaches to working. In 2012, I spent a summer internship working for sculptor and installation artist Soo Sunny Park. This was a priceless opportunity and an integral part of my artistic development and education in terms of understanding space and place. She encouraged me to think about my images in material ways and take my interest both in sculpture and images into installation territory. She taught me that sculptors have a unique understanding of space. I want to continue to develop and explore that in my work—subverting expectations of what images and installation can be.

09_NatalieHunter_Dappled
Natalie Hunter. Dappled (detail). 2018. Archival inkjet prints on backlight film draped over poplar and aluminum sculptures. Approximately 24″ x 60″ x 36″ each. Documentation courtesy of the artist.

Q: Can you speak more about the upcoming exhibition Shaping Time: Natalie Hunter, Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklarat at Latcham Art Centre? What work will you be displaying?

NH: Shaping Time: Natalie Hunter, Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklar at Latcham Art Centre considers ideas of memory and time through a multimedia lens. Elisa Coish curated Shaping Time around the 40th anniversary of Latcham Art Centre. Part of her curatorial strategy involves inviting artists at different stages of their careers to create a larger dialogue surrounding these concepts and the different approaches and discussions that can arise from it. Both Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklar are well recognized and established artists that have exhibited with Latcham Art Centre in the past. Elisa Coish invited me as the emerging artist to exhibit work in Shaping Time after my solo exhibition Staring into the sun closed at Rodman Hall in May. I will be exhibiting some of the work that was shown at Rodman Hall in Staring into the sun, but also some work that has never been exhibited that I made in 2018 with an Ontario Arts Council grant. The work going in Shaping Time is an overview of the many approaches and materials I use to consider light, time, and memory in both installation and photo-based ways. It will be interesting to see how I respond to the space during installation because Latcham Art Centre is essentially a white cube. Corners are often considered non-spaces, and I am fond of corners for their surreal shape and potential for activating a space. In this way, I’m hoping to converse with some of the architectural elements in the space during installation.

 You can view more of Natalie Hunter’s work from July 10 – August 24th 2019 in Shaping Time: Natalie Hunter, Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklar at Latcham Art Centre, curated by Elisa Coish and on her website.