The Blue Hour - Capture Photography Festival

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Joi T. Arcand, "Northern Pawn, South Vientam - North Battleford, Saskatchewan," 2009

from the series "otē nīkān misiwē askīhk - Here On Future Earth." (courtesy the artist and Saskatchewan Arts Board Permanent Collection)

Thursday, April 5th, 2018 7:00 - 9:30 PM

Free Admission No Formal RSVP Required Cash Bar

Writing in 1857, only a few short decades after the “invention” of photography, the art historian and critic Elizabeth Eastlake describes the photographic image as one that approaches us from the future and arrives in the present. While referring to the new technologies in chemical photography at the time, Eastlake’s comment might also be interpreted more portentously, as critical theorist Kaja Silverman suggests in The Miracle of Analogy (2015): as an invitation to upend canonical readings of photographs, which emphasize their simultaneous demonstration of “this-has-been” and this-is-no-more.”

The Blue Hour extends from this radical premise to rethink our assumptions about the photograph’s relationship to time. The exhibition presents work by five Canadian and international artists – Joi T. Arcand, Kapwani Kiwanga, Colin Miner, Grace Ndiritu, and Kara Uzelman – and collectively acts as a proposition to consider the futurity of the photographic image.

The exhibition’s title makes reference to the brief period of twilight at dawn and dusk when the linearity of time appears to momentarily hover in a state of suspension. We might understand this “blue hour” as analogous to the photographic event, which as literary theorist Eduardo Cadava has claimed, “interrupts the present; [...] occurs between the present and itself, between the movement of time and itself.” The space of radical potentiality – whether political, geological, cosmological or philosophical – that opens up within this state of suspension forms the central inquiry of this exhibition.

Exhibiting artists: Joi T. Arcand, Kapwani Kiwanga, Colin Miner, Grace Ndiritu and Kara Uzelman.