Meditation on the Studio Wall

I was reading W.G. Sebald’s, The Rings of Saturn, and came across a passage where he speaks of two Persian friars who had brought the first eggs of the silkworm from China.

It was an amazing process involving a strange gelatinous concoction of silver nitrate and other chemicals heated in a crock pot in the darkroom to be later cooled and then squeezed through a kitchen ‘ricer’ and then reheated. The liquid was then carefully poured onto the surface of a very clean pieces of glass put into the back of the 4″ X5 camera and exposed.

Saturday October 24. The Long Exposure: Duration, meditation and the un-archivable, is one of three ‘open studio’ events that Trudi Lynn Smith and I staged in order to invite dialogue around a project that we had been working on involving photography and the studio space at 562 Fisgard Street.

Part of my attraction to the work is that it could not survive, and now only exists in relatively few murky black and white photographs that I peer into in an attempt to reconstruct it in my mind.

“We face the imperative to understand anew today what it might mean for photography to ‘move beyond representation’.” (Hito Steyerl from ‘Documentary Uncertainty’)

Over the past week I encountered two works that caught my attention. One was during a critique session at UVic when Nic Vandergugten presented a video installation of Tree Climb the other was over a coffee with Trudi Lynn Smith as we talked about her ongoing project Trouble With Trematodes.