Exhibition Dates: November 1st – 26th, 2023
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 10:00am – 2:00pm
Artist Statement
Nostalgia is an ongoing project that explores historical artifacts in conflict with the
present, and which questions the relationship of past to present.
A microphone with a damaged cord, a typewriter with jammed paper, a sewing machine
with tangled thread, a broken radio, images that explore the inoperability of the historical
artifact and the question of what it means to be out of step with time.
These photographs, both digital and large format images, explore their subjects through
long exposures and shifting lights, revealing the material surface and complicating
legibility of the subject, decomposing its structure and using light as a medium of
simultaneous revelation and estrangement as historical objects are rendered in a
defamiliarizing light.
Nostalgia attempts to address and acknowledge the sweeping changes we live in the
midst of, materially, culturally, politically. It is a project that exploits the photographic
medium’s distinctive ability to record history, to provide material testimony to what once
was and what remains, but here in a way that emphasizes the irretrievability of the past.
These are subjects that have lost their original function and evolved into something
else, into emblems of past experience, objects that have now become reservoirs of lost
memories and sensations, and of a sense of nostalgia for something that no longer
exists.
3rd Sunday at the Gallery
Event Date: Sunday, Nov.19th
Time: 1:00-3:00pm
Join Frederick for an artist talk and slide show exploring some of the formative
influences and aesthetic intentions behind the Nostalgia project.
Artist Bio
I’m a New Westminster photographer whose work, both professionally and
artistically, has focused on the architectural structure of objects and spaces,
exploring the interaction of outer structures with inner, their conflicts and points
of collision.
Much of my creative work has emerged from my professional practice in
architectural and industrial photography, and is positioned at the intersection of
the organic and the engineered, where material objects and spaces become
subject to the organic processes of erosion and decay. It is an approach based
on the idea that objects gradually become encoded with layers of information,
and that photography is the medium perfectly suited to exploring these marks
and accidental hieroglyphs deposited by the passage of time.
My industrial projects like Collision, presented in 2016 at The Gallery at Queen’s
Park, focus on using the photographic medium’s ability to record light both
instantaneously and over time, so that light becomes both an agent of
simultaneous disclosure and distortion. My training in large format and
architectural photography at Langara College pointed me to a path, both
professionally and creatively, seeking creative methods to use light to disclose
information encoded on the material surface.
My technical training and professional work have provided the foundation for
creative expression, for projects characterized by a desire to exploit the
medium’s full range of possibilities, shooting in large format and small, colour
and black and white, digital and film, natural light and studio light, constantly
seeking ways to disclose the secret architecture of the material world. In 2021, I
was awarded a Canada Council of the Arts grant supporting my photographic
work.
Email: fpopowich@lightspeed.ca
