The 2018 Capture Speaker Series featured talks by David Campany, Erin Siddall and John O’Brian, Nadia Belerique and Sky Goodden, and Kaja Silverman (not recorded). This year, conversation covered everything from the fate of photographic archives, to nuclear power, to how we view our contemporary culture.
Once again, our host and partner Inform Interiors filmed and produced video documentation of the first three talks of the Speaker Series that you can view below.
David Campany
Yesterday’s News—Archiving and Appropriating News Photography
Internationally renowned curator and critic David Campany discusses the nature and fate of news photography archives, the appropriation of press imagery by artists, and in particular the works of Thomas Ruff, Jonah Samson, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, which appear in Yesterday’s News, an outdoor exhibition curated by Campany for Capture 2018.
Erin Siddall & John O’Brian
Art in the Atomic Age
Artist Erin Siddall and art historian and curator John O’Brian both have a fascination with the atomic: Siddall’s Proving Ground, Nevada, Vancouver, installed at the Broadway–City Hall Canada Line Station, explores global histories of nuclear power through the once-coveted (and radioactive) household item uranium glass. O’Brian’s BOMBHEAD exhibition, on view at Vancouver Art Gallery, looks at the impact of the nuclear age as represented by artists and their art, and includes Siddall’s film work Fukushima Half Life.
How have artists approached the atomic in their work? How do the intertwining histories of nuclear power and photography affect artistic production? As new threat of nuclear action looms today, what responsibilities does art have to address this topic? Together Siddall and O’Brian trace the influence of the nuclear on artistic expression in the atomic age and of art on nuclear activity.
Presented in partnership with Burrard Arts Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Nadia Belerique & Sky Goodden
Between the Shutters—Nadia Belerique and the Spatial Object
Nadia Belerique, the artist behind this year’s BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project, discusses In the Belly of a Cat and her other works with Sky Goodden, founding editor of Momus. They touch upon the poetics of perception, the role of images in contemporary culture, and the exchange between artist and viewer.
