[Fall 2021]

Capture Photography Festival 2021
Vancouver
April 1–30, 2021

By Karen Henry

[Excerpt]
It’s impossible to review the Capture festival, a rambling aggregation of events in Vancouver that celebrate photography, as a whole. Here, I focus on public art billboards and the major festival commission.

Billboards are of a scale to command attention in the urban landscape. Works by Anique Jordan are located on Expo Boulevard along the Northeast False Creek inlet, set in the hardscape of viaducts and concrete towers. The two images, on the front and back of a single billboard, first appear as black­and­white abstractions. But if you’re walking or stopped at the light, you can see the highlights and contours of dark skin and a wisp of tightly coiled hair. These images are the most understated of the 2018 Darkie series pairing stark white planes and a black female body. The works are defined by contrasts – white, hard, unyielding/black, organic, vulnerable – and so unsettle the abstraction they evoke. Jordan talks about her artwork as haunted, “patronized by what cannot be represented.” In this time and place, the billboards quietly both indict loss and proclaim presence in relation to the patriarchal space of development, the history of art, and the imperative of Black Lives Matter…

 

See the magazine for the complete article and more images: Ciel variable 118 – EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY