In Review: Natalie Hunter at the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery
We are pleased to share the remarkable installation of Natalie Hunter's recent exhibition, Through sunset, slow dusk, and gathering dawn; from the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ontario.
Hunter's studio practice utilizes film photography, installation, sculpture, and the moving image. Using these photographic media she considers themes of the poetics of time, memory, temporality, chance, perception, the archive, and the senses - with an emphasis on embodied experience, perception, materiality, personal memory, and identity.
VIEW ALL AVAILABLE WORKS BY NATALIE HUNTER
Installation of Natalie Hunter Through sunset, slow dusk, and gathering dawn at Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery, 2024; photograph. Images courtesy of Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery. Photographer Toni Hafkenscheid.
Artist's Series Statements
Crystal Garden Statement
Gardens are sensory spaces. Impermanent, unfixed, vulnerable, ever changing living things in constant flux according to cycles of time and seasons. They are carefully cultivated extensions of our consciousness, our memories, and our bodies. We tend to gardens like we tend to people; caring for living things with touch and sunlight, water, and soil to grow. We need gardens as a food source but find solace in the act of tending and caring. My parents garden is an infinite source of sensory information and recollection. There are elements in my parents garden that are transplanted from my grandparents garden, and I hope they will one day be in mine. Crystal Garden studies the construct of the garden in relation to memory, time, space, consciousness, and perception. Through an engagement with the materiality of film, Crystal Garden investigates the act of gardening in time and space while considering the elemental forces of light and time and their material affects on the body, mind, and in photography.
The garden is a place that is heavily represented subject matter in art history, and also used as a metaphor for our human desire to cultivate relationships with the natural world around us. Looking at the concept of the garden as a social construct, I explore immaterial concepts such as time, light, space, memory, embodiment, the senses, motion, air, and breath through material, image, and form. In Crystal Garden I consider light and time as elemental forces in the act of making of photographs. Light is considered a material used to both make photographs and activate the space in which they exist; making them a material encounter. Light is an essential ingredient in making photographs. It is how we see colour and form, and also how we see and experience physical objects in the world. But it is also a destroyer of materials, our skin, and our eyes. The sun is both volatile and nourishing. In my work I hope to look at both of these aspects of light both materially and pictorially, and use light as a material as much as an ingredient in image making. Just as sunlight illuminates the cells in leaves, light activates my images, making them a form of slow moving fragmented cinema.
The Sun’s Rays Do Not Burn Until Brought To a Focus Statement
The Sun's Rays Do Not Burn Until Brought To A Focus is a body of photographs that explore light, space, memory, fragility, architecture, and the history of photography. Using medium format film, multiple exposures, and hand made colour filters, I attempt to explore light and space as it relates to memory, perception, and viewer experience. Looking to fiction and literature references to light, the history of photography, and the light and space movement in art history, I question our physical, emotive, and psychological relationships to light as it envelops us daily within the spaces we inhabit most, rests in memory, but often escapes our notice.
Photographs are extensions of who we are, what we think, and how we feel. A room reflects a state of mind. In this body of work light is used to make photographs, activate spaces, and considered as a material. Light is a key ingredient in making photographs. It is how we see colour and form, and also how we see and experience physical objects in the world. But it is also a destroyer of materials, our skin, and our eyes. The sun is both volatile and nourishing. In my work I hope to look at both of these aspects of light both materially and pictorially, and use light as a material as much as an ingredient in image making.
Mapping the movement of the sun as it animates the industrial building where my studio is located, I follow the sunlight as it moves throughout corridors and windows over the course of many days; witnessing the subtle nuances that can only be experienced through intimate familiarity with a space over time. Using a combination of medium format film, multiple exposures, colour filters, and light, the images in The Sun’s Rays Do Not Burn Until Brought To A Focus are entirely made within the camera, and composed from multiple separate moments in time. Relying on chance and the materiality of film, changes in light with the addition of colour produces separate pieces of time collapsed into a single moment. This extended study in the ephemeral qualities of light and the passage of time attempts to unravel our memories of the spaces we know intimately through time and lived experience. And how traces of our interior most private spaces linger in our minds long after we’ve left them behind.
To Breathe Light Statement
To Breathe Light continues to my interest and research in time, memory, the senses, motion, and light through the use of colour filters and light as materials in image making. In this series of images, I use 120mm colour film along with colour filters and reflective surfaces as both filters and a mirror. Passing and moving the these materials in front of the camera lens as I make my exposure disrupts, bends, and activates light entering the camera; producing subtle shifts in colour, physicality, and distortion. The resulting images are soft, imperfect, experimental, and ethereal multiple exposures that contain mirror imagery of my surroundings in addition to what I’m looking at with a lens. Each double exposure is made roughly within the space of a breath. Recording the act of breathing - 2 seconds inhale and 3 seconds exhale - where the camera looks outward from the body toward the sky or through a window. The images in To Breathe Light function like imprints of the processes and materials used to make them. Producing encounters that speak to the slowness of time and the process of recording an experience that relates more to the rhythms of the body than it does to mechanical or digital reproduction.