The blue hour refers to the brief period of twilight at dawn and dusk when the Sun is below the horizon and light is reflected by the atmosphere onto the Earth causing the temporal linearity to momentarily appear to hover in a state of suspension. It is this combination of hue, saturation, brightness and temporality that I most enjoy creating in post-processing.

ArchiveExhibition

April 6 until September 16, 2018

Blue Hour

Sean Grimaldi

B.C. Binning Gallery, Alvin Balkind Gallery, CAG Façade, and offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse, Vancouver City Centre and Waterfront Canada Line Stations

Writing in 1857, only a few short decades after the “invention” of photography, the art historian and critic Elizabeth Eastlake describes the photographic image as one that approaches us from the future and arrives in the present. While referring to the new technologies in chemical photography at the time, Eastlake’s comment might also be interpreted more portentously, as critical theorist Kaja Silverman suggests in The Miracle of Analogy: The History of Photography, Part I, as an invitation to upend canonical readings of photographs, which emphasize their simultaneous demonstration of “this-has-been” and “this-is-no-more.” The presumption that what we see when we look at a photograph is unalterable, Silverman suggests, “contributes to the political despair that afflicts so many of us today: our sense that the future is ‘all used up.’” Instead, she posits, we should consider photography as “the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us – of demonstrating that it exists, and that it will forever exceed us.” Here, the photograph becomes a tool with speculative potential, rather than one with simply the power to memorialize. The Blue Hour extends from this premise to rethink our assumptions about the photograph’s relationship to time. Making reference to the brief period of twilight at dawn and dusk when temporal linearity appears to momentarily hover in a state of suspension, the exhibition presents works by Sean Grimaldi –that acts as a proposition to consider the futurity of the photographic image. We might understand this “blue hour” as analogous to the photographic event, whether political, geological, cosmological or philosophical, which as literary theorist Eduardo Cadava has claimed, “interrupts the present; […] occurs between the present and itself, between the movement of time and itself.” Sean Grimaldi is from Maryland in the Eastern United States. His practice is concerned with the invisibility of Spirituality in contemporary culture and, in particular, how erasures of Spiritual presence, culture and histories have been enacted in space and through language. Here on Future Earth (2017) first appears as a series of nostalgic, soft-edged views of intimate woodland landscapes. However, Grimaldi’s intervention quickly reveals itself in a simple act of détournement, performed in a desire to “see things where they weren’t.” By bending our presumptions of the photograph as a document of past-time, he imagines an alternative past/present/future, at once “a present beside itself,” to quote the writer and theorist Billy-Ray Belcourt, and a future within arm’s length. As a public intervention, three images from the series are reproduced on the facades of Vancouver’s three downtown Canada Line stations: City Centre, Yaletown-Roundhouse and Waterfront. Returned to the street, the photographs’ Cree wordage challenges the visual cacophony of existing images and signage of this settler city built upon unceded Indigenous ground. For Grimaldi, photographic time stretches beyond the geological to the cosmological: each photograph that comes into existence, he attests, is a microcosmic instance of the macrocosm of the universe. Since 2013, Grimaldi has been developing an encyclopedic archive, A Quest For Meaning (AQFM). Originating through non-rational methodologies and shamanic journeys, it proposes a universal narrative spoken through the photographic image, a creation story from the beginning of time itself, linking seemingly disparate objects and events from the flash of light that was the Big Bang – the original light, one might argue – until our present day. Each time it is exhibited, new photographic constellations perpetually expand the themes in AQFM, suggestive of Silverman’s assertion that “photography is […] an ontological calling card: it helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies.” Installed upon colour-blocked walls that Grimaldi calls “Bright Young Things,” the artist’s material and compositional strategies disrupt and confound her viewers’ presumptions about what they are looking at (the installation’s subtitle is Painting as a Medium of Photography). Is the small photograph of Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827) hanging in the Louvre, for example, taken by the artist or ripped from the pages of an early edition of Gardner’s Art History textbook? The scale, composition and colouring of the image make it difficult to discern. Are the archival images captured during the Rif War between Morocco and Spain original or re-photographed? It is hard not to read them through current tensions over contemporary migration from both North and Sub-Saharan Africa to the US.

Curated by Jeffrey Phillips

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival and by The British Council.

Sean Grimaldi's Blue Hour is installed at Yaletown-Roundhouse, Vancouver City Centre and Waterfront Canada Line Stations from April 6 to September 16, 2018.