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SHUTTER (June 18 to September 3, 2022) adad hannah, althea thauberger, dayna danger, thaddeus holownia, suzy lake, fred rosenberg, sandra semchuk, jerry desvoignes, dr. johanne sloan, lauren fournier, adrienne huard, sarah fillmore, deb thompson, lynne bell, didier morelli. curated by arin fay | Executive Drector, Astrid Heyerdahl, M.a., M.Ed. ©2022 the nelson museum, archives & gallery all rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. ISBN: 978-1-9990446-5-7 Printed in canada first printing, 2022 catalogue design by stephanie delnea, nelson museum, archives & gallery photography by louis bockner, and courtesy of the artists, unless otherwise indicated Published by: the nelson museum, archives & gallery 502 vernon street, nelson BC V1L 4E7 nelsonmuseum.ca with generous support from: NELSON MUSEUM ARCHIVES & GALLERY shu

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foreward astrid heyerdahl, M.A., M.Ed. executive director | nelson museum, archives & gallery she/hers nelson, british columbia The camera, in its multiple forms—a diverse tool of analogue and digital representation—provides artists Adad Hannah, Althea Thauberger, Dayna Danger, Thaddeus Holownia, Suzy Lake, Fred Rosenberg, Sandra Semchuk, and Jerry DesVoignes, with a method of artistic delivery, a platform to present their worldview, and a process to question, explore, and express their relationships to the complex world. SHUTTER is another wonderful example of the critical curatorial work undertaken by the Nelson Museum, Archives & Gallery, and speciﬁcally of our multi-year endeavour to elevate the media-based group exhibition format—showcasing the work of artists from across Canada within the context of the remote BC interior. We thank the artists for their passionate participation, and Curator, Arin Fay, for masterfully coalescing distinct yet allied visions into one space. The SHUTTER project was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and the Nelson and District Credit Union. The Nelson Museum acknowledges that the Museum resides on the traditional, unceded and current territory of the Sinixt and Ktunaxa People. We would like to thank and acknowledge the Sinixt Confederacy, Ktunaxa Yaqan Nukiy, and the West Kootenay Métis Association for the opportunity to live, learn, and share in cultural experiences in this beautiful place.

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curatorial essay arin fay curator | nelson museum, archives & gallery she/hers nelson, british columbia The history of photography is a history of invention and evolution, a quest to capture, elevate and assert some sort of transcendence over time. The word ‘capture’ should be understood with all the connotations of wizardry that it implies. What precedes the mere mechanics of the devices themselves— from camera obscura to DSLR—is a fascination with shadow and light, semblance and resemblance, and the composition of all aspects at play, those in the frame and those that remain outside our scope of reference. Pieces of the world are captured and remain ever connected to the context in which they are/were observed and preserved. The artists that contributed to the SHUTTER ex-hibition—Dayna Danger, Adad Hannah, Sandra Semchuk, Jerry DesVoignes, Suzy Lake, Thaddeus Holownia, Fred Rosenberg, and Althea Thauberger —explore a range of means and method that contribute to the photographic canon as it stands today, and the endless range of expression found therein. From analog approaches to myriad manipulations and points of view, these artists, in respective ways, elevate and challenge our expectations of photography as an art form. In the spirit of multifarious points-of-view, and in addition to my own reﬂections on the works that make up the SHUTTER exhibition, I have included the voices of other artists, curators and academics, in order to create as expanded a conversation as possible. This approach mirrors the group exhibition ethos; an appreciation and understanding that art is both an isolated and compounded experience which does not exist within a single frame of reference. Adad Hannah Adad was granted permission to photograph Rodin sculptures in Paris, which became the ﬁrst of many layers of creative contemplation that contribute to these works. The titled but untitled series is an augmented homage to Rodin’s work and the spirit of embroiled energy that deﬁnes it. These works are

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interventionist in the sense that they uphold and contemporize their subject matter by way of activa-tion/inspiration—hand-tinted photographs on steroids —bringing vibrancy and action to sculpture in repose. Thaddeus Holownia With an emotionally responsive eye Thaddeus mediates the world around him, ﬁnding the beauty and hope, the quiet tragedy, the subtle hidden and overlooked things, and the intricate facets of both the natural and built worlds that are connected like spiders’ webs to one another. The exquisite and interconnected ethos of fallen birds and the perfection of pitcher plants emerging from the darkness tell tales of how the world both builds and obfuscates beauty. There is cause and effect in these works, and what feels like a benevolent warning to pay attention to the world around us in all its tangled detail. Althea Thauberger The immersion of self as other muse is on the periphery of performance and at the core of Althea’s photos. Both an exercise in empathy and a deep dive into the politics and perspective of a given time period, Althea posed as Lorraine Althea Monk, writer and director at the National Film Board from 1957-1967. In so doing, the construction of character and identity are questioned on both an individual and cultural level, considering not only an idealized female role but how representative that construction is of all identity, and how the medium of photography is an important tool in creating, disseminating and cultivating what we see: how and why. Suzy Lake There is a kinetic quality and overt frame-by-frame sequence to Suzy’s Rhythm of a True Space, which pulls one in to the performance on display—the shufﬂe, dust, and impossible task at hand. Suzy’s work is about the documentation of self in every sense. Invisible and emotional labour is given monu-mental space, and feels like part of a continuum that we are only seeing fragments of; a chapter of a book, a glimpse out the window of a moving car …. a day in the life. Sandra Semchuk & Jerry DesVoignes The evocation and honouring of unspoiled, sun dappled and fragmented space is honoured and accentuated in the installation by Sandra Semchuk in collaboration with Jerry DesVoignes – the measure of his steps, brohm lake, bc. Image, poetry, and sound are joined to create a rareﬁed space in the otherwise austere gallery setting. These combined elements and purposeful peek-a-boo views, which hint at untold vastness and fragmentation, evoke an almost eerie but mystical aura that happens when one sees the forest for the trees. Fred Rosenberg Fred and I had a conversation about being mindful to not focus so much on the camera and the mechanics of photography—to not make it the hero of this exhibition story. We talked about the camera as the anti-hero instead. Arin: I think that the camera as anti-hero would be excellent fodder for discussion! And I think it is more a focus/theme (as you say) than a prescriptive alter upon which to bend the knee - and strike a pose—cameras are tools—just one small facet of a much larger conversation about landscape and framing and perspective and relationships and interpretations and ego and the surface and subterranean interpretation of things .... the million details that go into any/all art. Fred: Don’t know if I was prompted by your anti-hero camera comment, but I suddenly see how the camera has been a hero: it’s a clear ﬁlter for mitigating terror, the tool for framing shock and awe so to take

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it home to indulge, to study, to ﬁnd (make?) some peace. It doesn’t stand alone, though, separate from me the one using it to see more clearly. Perception itself ought to be the idea being showcased. Dayna Danger Countering and correcting the often staged and stereotypical photos of Indigenous people from the early history of photography, Dayna’s work communicates an autonomy, authenticity and deeply rooted connection to, and symbiosis between, place and people; there is no demarcation between where the people begin and the land ends but an almost indecipherable melding of the two. Both Asinnijaq shutter opening night artist talk. Left to right: sandra semchuk, Suzy Lake, Thaddeus Holownia, fred rosenberg, adad hannah, althea thauberger, dayna danger. photo: jeremy addington

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With Rodin Reworked, the paint that Adad Hannah applies over photographs of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures comes into view like some kind of alien matter, interrupting the material circumstances of both sculpture and photography. The paint is viscous and amorphous, but it also has an energetic force. The result is that Hannah’s lively gestures of pigment appear to interact with Rodin’s gesturing bodies. Hannah has been working with Rodin over an extended period of time. What does it mean for a contemporary artist to “work with” a long-deceased historical artist? There is certainly an element of paying homage to the earlier artist, but this sustained relationship goes beyond that to become a genuine conversation across time. In Rodin’s work, Hannah has found a generative source (or sounding board) for his own, twenty-first century interrogation of images and bodies. More precisely, Hannah’s repeated encounters with Rodin allow him to explore a tension between still and moving images, and simultaneously, a tension between still and moving bodies. Dr. Johanne Sloan Department of Art History, Concordia University adad hannah he/his vancouver, british columbia untitled (seated woman with geometric brush strokes) adad hannah, 2022, Hand-painted museum acrylic over archival pigment print in custom maple frames Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver.

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shutter | adad hannah untitled (Plasters in Muedon with peaches and blues) adad hannah, 2022, Hand-painted museum acrylic over archival pigment print in custom maple frames Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver. Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in the early 1980s, where he currently lives and works. He holds a Ph.D. and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Concordia University in Montreal, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver. Hannah’s work is in public and private collections around the world, and has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, West Africa, China, South Korea, Australia, Russia, Argentina, and Brazil. Hannah is currently represented by Pierre-François Ouellette, Art Contemporain in Montreal, and Equinox Gallery in Vancouver.

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They share reverence for the Land and non-human relatives by conveying the interconnectedness of rivers, stones, pathways, and shores, uniting their forms of relationality through these entities. The interconnectedness of these pieces links their physical and spiritual affiliation for one another, like veins that flow between each other. It signals to the lives that continue to flourish despite carrying the weight of colonial trauma. And while their ancestors come from different nations, they are all experiencing the same detrimental symptoms of settler colonialism; however, the trauma is not what bonds them. Instead, they simultaneously present imagery of rocks along shores and pathways that represent their generational ties. The river represents veins that are very much alive and still flowing, acknowledging the strength of past and future ancestors. When Veins Meet Like Rivers; / okhízata / maadawaan Adrienne Huard, 2021 dayna danger they/them winnipeg, manitoba the end of the world dayna danger, 2018, digital print

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dayna danger is a Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, Métis-Saulteaux-Polish, visual artist, hide tanner, drummer, and beadworker. Danger’s art practice is an act of reclaiming space and power over society’s projections of sexualities and representation. This transpires in Danger’s art by their intentionally large-scale images that place importance on women-identiﬁed, Two-Spirit, transgender, and non-binary people. Their art uses symbolic references to kink communities to critically interrogate visibility and rejection. Danger centres kin and practicing consent to build artworks that create a suspension of reality wherein complex dynamics of sexuality, gender, and power are exchanged. shutter | dayna danger

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Holownia’s work gives permission to see beyond the obvious and the mundane. His photographs hint at untold, unseen stories, latent in the world around us. He asks his viewers to quiet their lives and minds, to seek out the faces in the fire and the wolves in the rocks. Holownia’s work proves Thoreau’s point that what matters is what you see, and in his seeing we are able to look at the world in a new way, to feel ourselves suspended in the passage of time, resilient like a tree in a storm. Sarah Fillmore The Nature of Nature, The Photographs of Thaddeus Holownia 1976–2016, February, 2017 thaddeus holownia he/his jolicure, new brunswick icarus, falling of birds thaddeus holownia, 2018, Chromogenic print Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

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thaddeus holownia is a visual artist, teacher, letterpress printer and publisher. Holownia was born in England in 1949 and immigrated to Canada in 1954. After a forty-one year teaching and administrative career in the Department of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Holownia recently retired to his farm and studio in Jolicure, New Brunswick. Holownia’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including The Nature of Nature, The shutter | thaddeus holownia Photographs of Thaddeus Holownia 1976–2016, at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; The Terra Nova Suite, a twenty-ﬁve year survey of his work in Newfoundland & Labrador at the Provincial Gallery (The Rooms) in St. John’s Newfoundland; 24 Tree Studies for Henry David Thoreau at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York. His 1998 mid-career retrospective exhibition, Extended Vision: Photographs by Thaddeus Holownia 1978–1997, organized by the Canadian Museum of pitcher plant #2, #4, #7, #10 (left to right) thaddeus holownia, 2020, Archival pigment print

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Contemporary Photography, traveled across Canada and to the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. His photographs have been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Monet’s Legacy: Series, Order and Obsession at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany, and Car Culture at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York. Holownia is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fulbright Fellow and an elected member of the RCA. He has twice received the Paul Paré Medal from Mount Allison University in recognition of excellence in teaching, creative activity, research, and community service. His contributions as an artist in New Brunswick have been recognized with the awarding of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Visual Arts from the New Brunswick Arts Board (artsnb) and the Order of New Brunswick.

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There is an adage, coined by the éminence grise Richard Schechner, that the phenomenon widely described as performance is in fact a restored behaviour, or “twice-behaved behaviour.” Suggesting that no single act is ever devoid of predecessors, that we are in fact engaged in a continuously reiterative process, this conceptual framework helps us rethink the past, present, and future contours of our very existence. Performance is what we have been already, a series of invisible forces driving towards what one might describe as a habitus - a set of socially recognizable codes shared amongst a population. Suzy Lake, Performance of Protest Arsenal Contemporary Art, New York Didier Morelli, 2019

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shutter | suzy lake suzy lake began her art practice in 1968. Following the social and political unrest of the 1960s she emigrated from Detroit to Montreal (1968), and then to Toronto in 1978. Active to the needs of her communities, she was a co-founder of Vehicule Art Inc. (Montreal, 1972) and the Toronto Photographers Workshop (Toronto, 1978). Concurrent to her practice, Lake taught for 40 years in Montreal, Toronto, and received Professor Emerita status from the University of Guelph in 2008. Lake was among the ﬁrst female artists in Canada to adopt performance, video, and photography to explore the politics of gender, the body, and identity. In 1993, she was the subject of a major mid-career retrospective, Point of Reference, organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1993. Lake has participated in signiﬁcant conceptual or feminist exhibitions such as: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (LA MOCA and tour, 2007-08), Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake, 1972-1978 (Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2007), Held Together With Water (Sammlung Verbund, Vienna and tour, 2008) and Trafﬁc: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-80 (2010). Suzy continues to address the relationship of the individual to societal forces in order to reveal constructions and restraints that have been built into our culture. In 2013, Suzy was awarded the Dazibao artist book prize and launched Suzy Lake: Performing an Archive in 2015. In 2014 the Art Gallery of Ontario presented a full-career retrospective with a substantial book titled Introducing Suzy Lake. In 2017, the Scotiabank Photography Award published a monograph of her work with Steidl Publishing. shutter installation view

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We see this in Rosenberg’s compositions; the viewer is drawn in close to the subject as Rosenberg situates himself neither above nor below but on a parallel axis and in this way creates empathy between the viewer and the subject. Rosenberg also places the gaze of his subject outside the lens of his camera; the narrative of the image then lies in the viewer’s ability to project his or her own emotions onto the subject’s gaze. This empathetic episode is what I believe lies at the heart of Rosenberg’s work and we, the viewer, are involved in creating the narrative of the piece. Critical to understanding Rosenberg’s opus is to remove ourselves from the familiar or provincial perspective of Rosenberg’s photographs and see them from an unfamiliar or non-referential place. The metaphorical nature of his works can then be seen and their lasting appeal as works of art is clear. Deb Thompson Curator (2010) fred rosenberg he/his nelson, british columbia Kites, early days and home built, Torrance, California (DETAiL) fred rosenberg, 1974, digital print

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shutter | fred rosenberg FRED rosenberg was born in Los Angeles, California in 1946, and studied photojournalism at San Jose State University from 1964-69. He moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1970, where he practised street photography and darkroom work for hire. In 1982 he moved to Nelson, British Columbia, where he opened a commercial studio, pretended to be a studio photographer and, over time, reset as a street photographer. Rosenberg has received several arts grants from both local and provincial organizations, and has been a BC Arts Council jury member. He has four portraits in the National Gallery, has participated in dozens of exhibits in and around Nelson, and has curated a historical photography exhibit celebrating Nelson’s Centennial. Rosenberg has taught photography classes to a wide variety of prticipants; most recently teaching darkroom skills to students at Wildﬂower Elementary School in Nelson.

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... we see the forest’s rich understory: a mix of plants pushing through a thick mat of orange pine needles – the silver tips of reindeer moss, delicate red pixie cups, and vivid lime-green mosses. In its mix of deep illusionistic space and intimate close-ups, this photo project recalls the photographic genre of the “colonial picturesque” whose unpopulated landscapes (suggestive of a terra nullius ripe for development) were so popular with white settlers in the early years of the twentieth century in Saskatchewan. In early twentieth-century photographic portraits of the Qu’Appelle Valley or the northern boreal forest, for instance, we see Saskatchewan depicted as it existed in the settlers’ exilic imagination: emptied of it Indigenous inhabitants and made over into an image of the longed-for home country. The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Unsettling Acts: Photography as Decolonizing Testimony in Centennial Memory Lynne Bell, 2011 In this installation, Jerry DesVoignes and I collaborate across two forests, one near Spokane, WA and the other near Squamish, BC. The landscapes of our childhood deeply and intricately inform perception. Our efforts to communicate that depth and to bring those stories into the present through overtone singing, photographs and text are creative adaptations, a coming to know one another in a time of diaspora. sandra semchuk, 2022 sandra semchuk & jerry desvoignes he/his vancouver, british columbia she/hers meadow lake, saskatchewan

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shutter | sandra semchuk & jerry desvoignes sandra semchuk asks the question: what leads towards deeper recognitions across generations, cultures and species? A photographer and scholar, Semchuk is a second-generation Ukrainian Canadian who was a Governor General Award recipient in Visual and Media Arts (1981). Semchuk has focussed her photographic and video work on relationships between herself, her family, and her community. In 1975 she exhibited photos of the people in her hometown, Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, on a main street where everyone from the community could stop and discuss them. She is a co-founder of The Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon, taught at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver for three decades and has exhibited nationally and internationally. She collaborated with her late husband James Nicholas, Cree writer and orator, on photographic, text and video works to disrupt myths that have shaped settler relations to First Nations. A major exhibition of these collaborations was shown at the Norman McKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan in 2020. Recent photographic and video works engage the wider-than-human—the forest---and the overtone singing of Jerry DesVoignes to provide a larger context for human narratives. Her artist’s book, The Stories Were Not Told, Canada’s First World War Internment Camps (University of Alberta Press, 2018) creates a space for internees and descendants to tell their stories. This book considers legislated racism and the intergenerational consequences of

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shutter installation view Canada’s ﬁrst internment camps when so many from the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires were interned. Most were Ukrainians. jerry desvoignes is a singer, composer, performer and teacher dedicated to building community through sound and voice. His music combines jazz, contemporary, rock, and world music and is the creator of the Mantravani Orchestra (1990) “Christmas In The Round” and the One Voice Harmonic Choir (2000) in Vancouver. He studied many spiritual traditions along with throat singing, and began teaching these techniques in the mid 90s, privately and in Wisdom of The Voice workshops. In the later 80s DesVoignes suffered a brain injury in a car accident that caused him to lose many of his innate abilities. The injury shattered his entire sense of self and created gaps in his memory and cognitive thinking. As a part of the healing process he discovered techniques of overtone ”throat” singing — creating three or more sounds simultaneously. Singing or listening to the overtones creates new neuro-pathways. In his video collaborations with artist/photographer, Sandra Semchuk, DesVoignes creates voice soundscapes with overtones, vocables and improvisation to support experiences of subtle states of mind in relationship to the wider than human. The story in the poem the measure of his steps is DesVoignes’, from adventures growing up in Spokane.

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