Post-mortem

July 9 – September 20, 2009
RBC Lobby West, Eric Harvie Theatre

Curator: Ola Wlusek
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 9, 4-6 p.m.

Gabor Szilasi, Bathroom, 1977. Colour photograph. Collection of The Banff Centre.

“Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”

- Roland Barthes

Barthes insisted that the photograph, despite its evident resemblance to its referent in the world, was never a straightforward document of external events.

This collection of images, instants suspended in space and time, offers elusive scenarios lacking in perfect endings. The atmosphere is vague, beauty surrenders to tension, forms and narratives are ambiguous, and relationships are awkward. Like a stain on the pavement, like the post-mortem following a violent but unexplained death, these photographs reveal the stillness of the aftermath, the mysterious residue of an ominous interior just emptied, and a sinister self-portrait strangely void of emotional energy. The subjects remain detached, spaces deserted, all guarding the secret possibilities of what has just occurred or what is about to happen.

What triggers a person to seemingly discard books out of an open window? Is that man cradling his face inside his palm hiding his tears or attempting to contain his laughter? Stylistically captivating but unsettlingly ambivalent, the images pose existential questions about the fleeting nature of loss.

Challenging the accurate rendering of a subject and the authority of the lens, these photographs offer only a faint impression of the potential encounter between the seer and the seen. To witness both the birth and the death of an event simultaneously is cause for anguish. Yet these images solicit personal fantasy and speculation to fill the void, to understand the narratives, or to simply allow for the teal bathtub to remain empty and the dust to collect in the corners.

Post-mortem draws on the collection of The Banff Centre to reflect on how photography has the peculiar power to create commanding and performative representations of our consciousness, to unveil the spectacle of time and to summon the dead to return.