ways to find out where you are
the show/the lie/the truth
1. the show
I have an art exhibition on right now at Centre3 in Hamilton. It’s a show that’s been percolating for quite a while—I submitted my proposal in mid-2022, and was initially scheduled to exhibit in November 2023.
My proposal was built around a series of double-exposed summer dream photographs. But when the fall of last year came around, I was in the midst of such a tumultuous time that I couldn’t begin to address the prep I’d long been putting off; besides which, I was in such a barren winter state of mind that I couldn’t imagine focusing on hazy sunshine memories. My request to postpone was graciously handled, and the show was rescheduled to November 2024.
By the time I began seriously prepping for this show, my perspective on my own work had drastically changed, and I spent a long, agonized evening rewriting the statement I’d initially submitted.
First, let me tell you what I settled on for the show statement:
Across the summers of 2018 and 2020, I unknowingly took a series of double-exposed photographs. Each image is imperfect, with the sharp lines of exposures taken years apart interrupting one another mid-moment. Two stories, both about summers spent in precious places, are telling themselves at once, and neither is quite complete. Where do they diverge and intersect? Which part of each image is “real” and which is the ghost?
I’m interested in the stories we try to tell with photography, and the stories photography tells us about ourselves. These photographs, upon developing, prompted me to consider my relationship to their taking; to the people and places that were not-quite-preserved in doing so; and to the ephemerality of my own memory. The act of taking a photo is entangled with anxiety and urgency, but also with care and nostalgia. Photography—especially personal photography—speaks to our endless need to pinpoint, to remember, to hold on and preserve: "never again” lasting forever. And yet, my attempts to preserve these two summers resulted in a single unreality that I can’t quite recall.
Right off the bat, I’ll let you know that part of this statement is a lie—but we’ll get to that shortly.
Back in 2022, the show text I’d written was long, overwrought, and never really got to the heart of why I love these photographs. Similarly, the installation I’d originally proposed was complex—the images printed on mylar or acetate, suspended from the ceiling in intersecting layers to further abstract the images. The companion poem I’d written was to be screenprinted or projected, in fragments, onto the whole collage.
Looking back, I think I didn’t feel like a ‘real’ photographer at the time, and I was self-conscious about presenting the images as-is. I felt like I needed to punch them up, to try and hammer home what made them good, while at the same time masking what I perceived as technical deficiencies.
So much can change in the breadth of two years. The photos, in 2024, were printed at a modest 11x17” on a nice, velvety matte cold press. They were mounted with magnets flush to the wall. And the poem is written in full, in my own wonky hand, on a roll of tracing paper in plain 4B pencil. The show is not complicated. What I hope it is, as much as it can be, is straightforward and honest.
2. the lie
In prepping for this show, I’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about these photos, and even after hanging them up, new thoughts and feelings have been coming to light.
The most major realization I made was that my exhibition statement is factually incorrect; the first set of exposures—taken at a rental lakeside cottage—are not from 2018, but 2019. This is a significant error, because 2019 was a year that for many reasons would turn out to be one of the hardest of my life so far. I’d survived my tumultuous final year of my undergrad and, though miserable, had inexplicably insisted on remaining in Guelph. My dad’s health was precarious, and about to take a steep decline. Grief was about to move in with us for a long, long stay. How could I have forgotten when I took those photos? They’re saturated with the very delicate, documentary care I tried to describe in my show statement. But maybe I wasn’t ready to face just what these images meant to me.
The second set of exposures, intersecting and interrupting that fraught time, are indeed from 2020, the early first summer of the pandemic. Many things had happened and changed by then: I’d moved back home to Dundas; I’d broken certain cycles that had hurt me for years; and my dad’s health was looking much better. It was a summer that felt like we’d all come back together to heal under one roof. Things got done that had long needed doing. We rested; we talked; we tended to the plants; we built, with our own hands, a garden shed at the bottom of the backyard.
Having now acknowledged this time frame, it feels powerful to see this summer interrupting the other; both a warning and a reassurance that that time won’t last forever.
This year, installing the show, everything is different yet again. My dad has had a successful kidney transplant and is the healthiest he’s been in years. We’re no longer living under the same roof, so most days I have to accept that health sight unseen. I’m not sleeping in my childhood bed, nor am I sleepless on a mattress on the floor. I no longer feel the need to abstract my photos and poetry with translucent layers.
My mom took this photo of me while we were setting up at Centre3. I didn’t realize until midway through the process that the t-shirt I’d pulled on that morning was from that very same summer 2019 trip:
Nice. Weird. Full-circle, or parallel, or some other direction I can’t yet name. But here I am, with the things I carried with me through those years.
I wrote the poem that accompanies the photographs in the gallery in 2022. It opens like this:
well,
here you are and here you are as well
exactly in all the places I left you
exactly in all the ways I asked you to stay.
3. the truth
Here’s how you accidentally double-expose a roll of film: you use a secondhand point-and-shoot. You wind the film up manually and forget to tuck the tail in. You throw the roll in a bag somewhere. You experience immense, unending grief. You retrieve the roll from the bag. You load it back into your point-and-shoot.
The more I consider these photos, and the circumstances in which they were made, the more I think about duality, about the side-by-side actions taken by two versions of me at two times—winding the camera, squinting an eye, pressing the shutter—and the bookend quality of the pictures they produced: some terrible stuff happened once. But here is what happened before that, and here is what happened after.
Everything seems to come in pairs. Two summers to make the photos—two years to do anything about them—two more to feel ready for a show. I took these photos in the first place because I wanted to hold on; I wanted to preserve. Perhaps to suspend time. But photography, like time, doesn’t let you keep things. It plucks them away, and leaves something else in their stead. A message passed between seconds of captured light. Something reaches into the past and says, that time is over now—and this time is too. All times, someday, will end.
To me, these photographs, so long and tender in their making, have wound up being about hardship, and time, and above all resilience—a perennial flower that blooms over and over, dying and unfurling, regardless of whether you’re ready for it.
The timing is wrong, and then it’s right. We were there, and now we are here. I wasn’t ready, and now I am. Summer returns over and endlessly over again, petal bursting out from pistil.
Ways to Find Out Where You Are will be up at Centre3 until December 20.
The opening reception is this Friday, November 8, from 7-10pm.
xo xo,
Emmali