ART

This series of 4 red boxes is my graduation work from the Visual Arts program at Camosun College in Victoria BC. Each box contains or display sets of found photographs. The design of each box was guided by the content of the photographs. This interest in vernacular found photos, or other people’s photos, stemmed out the photography hobby I’d had since I was about 16, when I got an SLR and started using the high school dark room to print my own photos.

For example, this box contains a single slide found on a busy downtown street in Victoria. The slide was very damaged and difficult to decipher. I absentmindedly carried the slide in my wallet for months, looking at it occasionally. When I finally I figured the image out, I also had the idea to make sculptures using my collection of photographs.

When you press the little red button, a battery powered light illuminates the slide. What do you see?

Inspired by 19th Century peep shows, you crank the handle to move the black and white photographs past the window.

This one is more of a display. The photographs on top, the corresponding roll of film on the bottom. It had a lid that enclosed it, and locked together with eye hooks. I was thinking of something you might see in a museum like Fort Rod Hill. It has the look of something made in the 1970s for people in the 1950s.

In an antique shop, I picked up an old camera and took a picture to see if it worked, and then noticed that it had film inside. I didn’t really want the camera, but I really wanted the roll of film. I justified the theft by telling myself that no one will know the roll is missing because the roll isn’t really being sold in this context. I told myself, “I could be the only one alive who knows this roll exists”. Here are two of three pictures found on the roll.

The third photograph is the one I took in the antique shop, and is the last frame on the roll. I am amazed by the journey this roll went on to get to me. I accidentally completed a complete stranger’s roll of film, like a disposable camera at a party but I showed up way too late. Is this photo still a ‘found’ photo, if I took it without knowing I was taking it?

This photograph is the only one I still have documenting the fourth box, rolodex inspired, that organizes 36 photographs from two rolls of film belonging to a single owner, found as lone rolls. I cannot recall how I organized them or the categories written on the labels, but the photos documented a large outdoor family picnic. This is the graduate exhibition in Rogue Annex Gallery. I did not make these plinths and hated them, but they did the job I guess. I didn’t include the 3rd box because it was too long and awkward for any of the available plinths. I also thought it was the least successful, or so I told myself at the time. I am 21 years old in this photograph taken on April 30th, 1999.