MIDNIGHT SUN CAMERA OBSCURA FESTIVAL | THE WORLD INSIDE
Dianne Bos | Lea Bucknell | Bob Jickling | Ernie Kroeger | Donald Lawrence | Holly Ward & Kevin Schmidt AKA Desire Machine | Mike Yuhasz | Andrew Wright
Curated by Lance Blomgren
June 18 – July 25, 2015
Opening Night: Thursday, June 18th at 8:30PM
As a counterpoint to the site-specific installations in the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival, the ODD Gallery presents The World Inside, a group exhibition that investigates the intertwined subjects of landscape and viewership, perceptual mediation and the urgencies of our material condition. The World Inside illuminates the ways in which our visual technologies, including the eye itself, have worked to define and undermine our impressions of the real, our sense of self and community. The images and objects in this exhibition draw connections between what we see, how we see, and the enduring cultural effects of our empires of sight.
In this exhibition, the lens—the convergence point where rays of light intersect, where the world outside casts its inverted doppelganger into the darkened, retinal spaces of our minds—becomes both a literal focal point and exploratory metaphor. Through these porous apertures, the objective world passes into our highly subjective selves; our most deeply-held visual certainties flicker against our decidedly experiential, and impressionable, psychologies. Acts of translation, imagination, perceptual distortion, narcissistic bias, and psychological fantasy projection quickly threaten easy ideas of reality, often overwhelming collective understanding. For The World Inside, external reality can be better viewed as a quixotic, if startlingly potent, shared fiction. This exhibition posits a revision of vision itself. It proposes that our senses of sight, and our faculties of apperception, can perhaps reveal more about our place in the world than the world we actually perceive.
Image: Holly Ward & Kevin Schmidt, AKA Desire Machine, Eye of the Beholder____________________
The Camera Obscura Project brings together an international group of artists and other researchers interested in cameras obscura, related optical phenomenon and the meeting places of: art and science, cultural and wilderness settings, learning and play. Summer solstice, 2015, will see Dawson City, Yukon, as the setting for the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival. With funding from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada the Project is based at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, B.C.
Schedule and more info about the festival available here
Project Website: www.midnightsuncameraobscura.com
Charming Prospect ephemera available here