Movies of War

1 of 2 2 of 2 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.Photography has irrevocably changed the way that humans see the world. The ability to store any static image—as daguerreotype, cyanotype, on film, or digitally—allows the exact transmission of visual knowledge. But nothing exists in a vacuum. The technology of photography might be morally neutral, but it inherently grants a kind of power: someone is in charge, holding the camera, and something—or someone—else is displayed in front of it. For Secwépemc artist Tania Willard, century-old photographs of First Nations people typified this problem. A decade ago, the Sobey Art Award-winning artist curated an exhibition called Nanitch: Early Photographs of British Columbia from the Langmann Collection, and found herself continuing to think about the images she looked at.“I struggle with wanting to see these images, but their context is that [the people] have been photographed as a subject,” Willard reflects on a video call. “They don’t have the agency to frame the view of the camera of the person who was photographing them, which we can assume from the time was likely a non-Indigenous man… How do I show that image and share it without re-inscribing the kind of colonial language and images it’s a part of?” In Photolithics, Willard’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Polygon Gallery, this juxtaposition informs much of her work: considering photography as both a tool of colonialism and decolonialism. Photography is the function of using light to create images, but light has been affecting the world around us for millennia. “What kind of exposure, what kind of deep time, geological time exposure, is the earth we walk on?” she muses. “I like to take this extreme leap and say, ‘Yes, but what about all these other influences of light, if we’re understanding [photography] to be a medium of light?’” That means reimagining what photography can, and ought, to be. “As somebody who is schooled in the Western tradition… you’re used to seeing a lot of landscape imagery, and the lens of how those images are produced is very rarely questioned,” says Monika Szewczyk, Audain chief curator at the Polygon Gallery and co-curator of the exhibition, on the same call. “It’s a colonial lens, which is trying to capture and own whatever it sees, whereas what Tania was proposing, in my understanding, was something where the land is actually the lens… It’s a paradigm shift.”Willard’s artistic practice has often considered how to show historical artifacts while disrupting their original context. The trio of Vestige, Votive, and Visiting centres around century-old postcards that have been repeatedly laser-etched into garnet sandpaper, connecting light to physical rocks. Only Available Light similarly interrogates an old film, Harlan I. Smith’s 1928 reel The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia, by projecting it through huge quartz crystals. While Photolithics is composed of both old and new work, one notable aspect of it is the physical space that it occupies. Safelight is a treatment displayed on the gallery’s skylights, turning the sun’s light into a warm glow that changes through the day, and includes depictions of Indigenous methods of holding things—like basketry and cradle boards. “The space being almost completely open with Safelight on the windows, and these beautiful stripes of paint coming down the walls, almost turns the gallery into a basket itself,” says co-curator Serena Steel. “It offers a way of holding both the work with a lot of care, but also the people who are coming to see the work.” Domestic Markets. Tania Willard Steel is also Secwépemc, and she and Willard noted the bond in having shared cultural connections while envisioning the exhibition. Secwépemc teachings and practices are present in the staging of Photolithics too, such as with a central kekuli-inspired structure (pit house) that encompasses Only Available Light.“Kekuli are traditionally used by people in a few different nations,” Steel says, “in the winter times, when you would spend more time gathering and being together, after having spent the summer seasons being productive.” The Polygon’s kekuli, covered in canvas, nods to the practice while creating a comforting space to view a challenging work.“As you come in, [Only Available Light] is this warm, moving, flickering light,” Steels adds, “that almost resembles a fire that would be kept in the centre of it.”By weaving together modern technologies with ancient, Willard blurs the lines between what past and future really are. Evoking geological time draws a path between the many uses of light and rocks. Ulexite crystals—sometimes known as TV stones—have a natural fibre optic quality, and emerging technologies are only possible with rare earth minerals that have taken eons to form. “This is a space that really helps us see a way forward into the future,” adds Szewczyk. “I think there is an incredible need right now to restore the imagination.”Much like looking at the universe can make a human feel tiny in an awe-inspiring way, so too can thinking about the scope of time on earth create a unique sense of connection: to light, to the land, and to each other. Photolithics is at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver from March 7 to May 24. Join the discussion Facebook comments not loading? Please check your browser settings to ensure that it is not blocking Facebook from running on straight.com