Fixations: Thoughts on Time | Durga Rajah & Tommy Calderon
presented as part of the CONTACT Photography Festival 2022
Curated by Kelsey Myler & Christina Oyawale
Exhibition: April 6 - May 28, 2022
Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat 1 - 6 pm
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 5th at 6:30 pm
Performance by Durga Rajah: Thursday, April 21st at 2:30 pm
Featuring the work of emerging Toronto-based photographers Tommy Calderon and Durga Rajah, Fixations: Thoughts on Time explores conceptions of time in relation to photography. Using darkroom techniques, both artists engage the ways in which time is related to constructing and preserving an image, physically, psychologically, and culturally.
Rajah's A Measure of Time: 3 Seconds (2020/2022) anticipates a future moment that will come to pass. Influenced by her experience in performance, in which she has learned about form, rhythm, presence, gesture, and affect, Rajah’s images trace the phenomenology of a body in motion. By leaving her analogue photographs chemically unfixed for controlled intervals, Rajah’s work anticipates its completion in the future. In its attempts to fix time, this project generates an archive of a forever-receding moment.
Calderon's investigative series entitled Dialectics explores how time is a force that changes the experience of self.. Using historical photographic processes, he questions how image making creates a sense of time within histories of meaning, acknowledging the refractive ability of an individual as an intuitive source of knowledge. In his work, Calderon explores the intersections of the real and imaginary, thereby navigating the cultural and social aspects of time as they relate to individual experience.
A Measure of Time: 3 Seconds
Durga Rajah
In A Measure of Time: 3 Seconds Durga represents time objectively, in terms of photographic procedure; and subjectively, as a lived experience. With her own body as the subject, she uses continuous lighting to capture 3 seconds of movement in each photographic negative. Then, she follows the standard darkroom process for developing the positive print right up until the final fix bath, before which, each print is exposed to daylight for increasing measures of time: 1 second, 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 1 decade, and infinity.
The in-camera exposure is the primary measure of time in the photographic process, while the duration for which the paper is exposed to daylight is a secondary measure that encapsulates the essence of time within the photographic object, the print itself. The procedural and factual orientation of this work is supplemented by a more metaphoric aspect; the way in which the artist situates herself within the representation. In each photograph, she performs a movement that expresses a contemplative sense of being within the 3 second measure. The prints remain in process for their respective durations until fixed. With the ninth print unfixed, the work's gesture endures as far as time itself.
Documentary of Durga’s performance
A Measure of Time: 3 Seconds. Performance by Durga Rajah - Fixations: Thoughts on Time
Dialectics
Tommy Calderon
Dialectics (2019-2022) is a series of works that speak on the nature of the contemporary moment and the effects it has on the human condition. Imbued with qualities of early photographic imaging and ideas of western philosophical traditions, we are asked to consider our inclinations as a point of connection and departure from one another. Building upon this concept, Calderón’s images navigate the discordant relation between representation and reality so we may consider alternative considerations for human autonomy and understanding while acknowledging fundamental aspects of human and natural life.
Through the use of gelatin silver prints, the variation of images sizes, and the arrangement of subject matter; Calderón investigates the image-making process as a site of dissonance between imagination and reality; fiction and non-fiction; the way we interpret our relation to others. Created using a dated photographic process, Dialectics speaks of an increasingly complex society we must contend with while making use of outdated and possibly superseded notions of human knowledge and understanding to reconcile aspects of individual identity with the reality of our current era.
Durga Rajah is interested in the formal and material aspects of photography, and in its potential as an expressive medium. She explores performative strategies which imbricate subject hood within the photographic process and reevaluates photography's role in Conceptual Art. Durga is currently pursuing a Masters of Visual Studies at University of Toronto.
Tommy Calderon is a visual artist and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. Photography is central in his practice often exploring ontological questions of self through his subject matter. His images highlight our relationship to identity and memory as conditions that impact our psychological experience of images. Tommy is a graduate of the Image Arts: Photography Studies program at X University (formerly Ryerson University) in Toronto, Canada.
