2018 Capture Photography Festival Canada Line Competition
Vote for the photograph you think Capture Photography Festival should install on the exterior of the King Edward Canada Line Station. The winning installation will be part of the larger multi-sited Capture Canada Line Public Art Project, in partnership with the Canada Line Art Program and InTransit BC, which will stretch across multiple stations from Downtown Vancouver to Richmond.
VISIT THE OFFICIAL SITE
In Fall 2017, Capture Photography Festival and the Georgia Straight invited photographers of all backgrounds to submit images to the juried Canada Line Competition Station open call. The winning image(s) will be installed on the exterior of the King Edward Canada Line Station during Capture Photography Festival in April 2018 and remain on display for six months. The winning artist(s) will be paid a $600 fee.
All entries were reviewed by a jury of artists and fine arts professionals to identify the following shortlist. Cast a ballot for your favourite and be entered to win a $100 gift certificate towards printing at London Drugs Photo Labs. Vote for as many entries as you like, but multiple votes for the same entry will not be counted. The winning artist will be announced in February 2018.
The 2018 Capture Photography Festival Canada Line Competition Shortlist
Olivia Chaber
Artist Statement: The CHROMA series is part of ongoing research on colour, and more particularly its effects on the human psyche and body. How we come to understand the use of specific colours in various contexts stems from a long process of historical colour selection, the maintaining of status quo, and cultural creation as well as erasure. Colour as a pigment, and as a cultural signifier, is a loaded topic, but ultimately the ability to see colour is a shared human trait.
CHROMA begins to raise the question of perception using the concept of additive colour with subjects embodying the three “primary” ones under a high concentration of light in the desert sun. Theoretically and commonly accepted as the three foundational colours out of which every other perceivable one can be created, red, blue, and yellow pigments are used as a way of deconstructing the prism of our understanding and experience of colour.
Wade Comer
Artist Statement: Wade Comer is a Vancouver-based photographic artist. Current work has been focused upon the way we see. Wade Comer’s photographs investigate two main concepts: humanity’s effect on our environment and the way we see. Continually studying recognized masters of photography and working from the standards they have set, Comer has pursued his own goals: the merging of the technical with the heuristic and the prescribed with chance, asking how process affects both the initial idea and the final outcome.
Time Passages is an ongoing, multi-series project that uses the in-camera process as a paintbrush to create imagery evoking both individual and collective memory. Allowing chance to have an effect on both his way of thinking about photography and the creative process has enabled Comer to create images that are beyond the anticipation of his previsualization and beyond explanation in their finality.
Emily Geen
Artist Statement: The high-resolution screenshots of the Batch Transfers series contain chronological groupings of photos captured on the artist’s smartphone, which have been opened as stacks of windows on her desktop computer using Apple’s image-viewing software, Preview.
The individual photos that comprise these screenshots were taken for other purposes: usually with the intent of being uploaded to social media or simply to feed Emily Geen’s strong compulsion to respond to her surroundings by taking photographs. She saves all these pictures and is frequently tasked with managing the storage of this archive. There is no doubt that most of us can relate to the burden of amassed image data. The Batch Transfers series is a testament to this residue of visual information left behind by lived experience via the smartphone camera.
Geen is especially interested in installing these works at the King Edward Canada Line Station, as it will circulate these image fragments of quotidian urban experience back into public space. They will be visible to an audience of commuters who each carry a smartphone that accumulates their own trail of image data.
Gregory Geipel
Artist Statement: Gregory Geipel is a fine art and editorial photographer whose work reflects the experience of growing up in post–Expo 86 Vancouver. Through traditional and digital photography, Geipel explores the evolving city of his childhood—the rapidly disappearing corner stores, ghostly abandoned industrial spaces, and gentrifying urban enclaves—and the iconic West Coast landscape that stands in bold contrast to city life.
On the Corner is a series of photos of corner storefronts in the Lower Mainland, inspired by Sherelli’s, a neighbourhood corner store in South Burnaby. Cigarettes, lotto tickets, and candy bars were really the only things that were bought at Sherelli’s. Its big baby blue walls and faded red signs were an icon in the neighbourhood, and now it’s gone. It was recently torn down and two duplex houses have been built on the property. Every time Geipel drives by that corner, he misses the sight of that old storefront.
Natalie Hunter
Artist Statement: Signs of Light explores the complex relationships we maintain with public and private spaces. The artist considers light to be an emotive and psychological indicator of space and memory. Light animates our living space, and our living spaces often mirror the mind. This body of work explores our intimate relationships with lived spaces, the emotional attachments we place on private domestic spaces, and the continual eroding boundary between public and private in our contemporary digital age.
Using medium-format photography, transparency film, layering, and colour filters, the resultant photo-based installation depicts a fragmented view of the window in Natalie Hunter’s childhood bedroom. Resembling film stills, the passage of time, or a cinematic interpretation of a home, Hunter’s memory of this intimate space becomes public in its colossal size and communal location.
Resting somewhere between object and image, inside and outside, ephemeral and material within the transitory space of a station window, the photographs become both sculptural and immaterial. They encourage a thoughtful encounter with a private and personal space that is displaced from its original context and moved to a public domain. Ultimately, this work seeks to examine how traces of our interior, most private spaces linger in our minds, being, and memory, long after we’ve left them behind. In this way, the work considers how we navigate both public and private spaces in our digital age.
Tomas Jirku
Artist Statement: Light is energy. We take for granted that our reality exists only in visible light, yet just beyond that spectrum exists infrared, a realm where life is particularly active. Tomas Jirku uses an infrared-sensitive camera to capture this realm and presents it in context with visible light to highlight the distinction. Plant life is especially reflective of infrared light, as they glow brightly, radiating intense energy. This is true even in the harshest of mountain environments.
With this unseen world brought to the surface, the images challenge the viewer to consider processes that exist all around us, yet beyond our senses. To not take anything solely at face value has great implications, even in the daily life of a commuter.
Brandon Leung
Artist Statement: Brandon Leung’s Houseboy Project was inspired by his research into Chinese houseboys—Chinese immigrants who worked as house servants in early 20th-century British Columbia. Because early Chinese immigrants were barred from many jobs, housework was one of the few jobs they could take to survive. Many archival photographs show houseboys, usually in the background, posing with the families who employed them. By being photographed, these invisible labourers were made visible.
Through The Houseboy Project, the artist attempts to replicate the experience he had when first seeing this houseboy in that photograph. The project explores the ways in which history hides and silences certain narratives and how we may allow them to resurface. By using photographs sourced from the City of Vancouver Archives, Leung brings out the houseboy from the stream of history. In using several different methods, from setting up constructed scenes to darkroom manipulations, the artist’s aim is to make the viewer unsure of what they are looking at, leading them to different ways of seeing and to the notion that seeing is a contentious thing.
Jonathan Luckhurst
Artist Statement: Drawing from a range of references, from technology to architecture to biomorphic form, Jonathan Luckhurst’s minimalist abstractions are both familiar and strange. Using sculpture as his starting point, he degrades recognizable geometric and organic form through a process of photography and collage. His interests lie in our shifting perceptions and relationship to materiality and environment and is influenced by writing such as Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress.
Terra Poirier
Artist Statement: Terra Poirier works with low-fidelity formats to explore memory, place, and the disruption of both. Having spent much of her life on the move outside and within Vancouver, she is interested in how location functions as an anchor for memory, particularly insofar as both are unstable, a trait further shared by photography as a medium.
King Edward Station, with its striking view of multiple construction sites, is situated in an area of massive transition, in a city under enormous pressure, with a population struggling to find a place in it. Poirier’s work is rooted in such instability and tensions. The use of pinhole photographs arranged as diptychs offers fragmented and discongruous exterior and interior views in order to invite the public to reconsider and unsettle their perspectives on place, home, and security.
Tramp presents contrasting spatial, emotional, and relational states—private and public, inertia and motion, isolation and connection, staying and leaving, desire and ambivalence. Caution considers destruction and transition, vigilance and cover, territory and how to navigate it, bodily and otherwise—all themes of particular urgency in current popular discourses.
Patty Tseng
Artist Statement: The series An Unfamiliar Place investigates the dichotomy between what is essential and what is excessive, from a Chinese Canadian perspective. Inspired by the artist’s experience relocating from Taiwan to Canada, each photograph depicts miniature blank figurines travelling through a foreign landscape made of food products. The miniature figurines immersed in massive raw and processed food sceneries serve as a metaphor for mass production and excess.
The diptych Rice and Fish symbolizes the eastern motherland, China. As the figurines leave their familiar homeland and entering into a foreign landscape, the objects that comprise their surrounding shift from a distinctive Asian palette to an iconic Western one. This transformation emphasizes the sense of wonder and being lost foreigners experience when they first set foot in North America.
An Unfamiliar Place is a series exploring the idea of a cultural journey, diaspora identity, and displaced landscapes, which at times appear menacing and absurd and above all unfamiliar.
Matthew Vogt
Artist Statement: Matthew Vogt’s latest series of digital photographs offers a glimpse of a pedestrian’s perspective. By capturing oft-overlooked scenes around the city of Vancouver, his work acts as a record of the many roads, sidewalks, and alleys he has explored on foot—creating a sense of place by weaving together the everyday scenes that make up our urban environment.
Vogt prefers to wander the streets of Vancouver alone, stopping frequently to observe, taking abrupt changes in direction, and following his curiosity with spontaneity. The resulting images represent an attention to detail achieved only by slowing down enough to look closely.
Upon returning to his studio, he carefully selects and edits his photographs, working with the elements of the image to bring out the contrast, texture, colours, and drama of each scene. In this way, his work feels almost cinematic—a testament to his interest in seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary places we pass by each and every day.
Gerri York
Artist Statement: The Alley series explores the transformation of material matter from ink drawings to their juxtaposition with photography. The pooling of ink on polyester film speaks to the material relationship of translucent light and photography, and the process of drawing explores the ambiguities of chance in their spilt form.
The images become something else again once they make their way off the studio wall and into the scanner, their unclear referents now attached to all the possibilities of digital layering with photographs. The resulting images recall the past tense of photography—the sense that something has just happened. An ordinary street or back alley sets the stage for a mise en scène and the possibility of a spectral presence.
The building sites—alleys, machinery, and holes in the ground—depicted in this series function as references to many neighbourhoods in Vancouver, including that of King Edward Station. The work suggests a contemporary culture experiencing extensive construction and rapid change. These images engage with the public by indicating urban life in transition, alluding to a travelling public presence and the banality of a back alley scene.
PRIZES
- $100 gift certificate for printing at London Drugs Photo Labs
This contest has ended.
Contest Deadline: Wednesday, January 31, 5:00 pm
Winner(s) will be contacted either by phone or email.
