I am proud to be awarded Exposure 2023 Emerging Photographer of the Year Award 2023 earning me a solo exhibition, Picturing the Infrathin at Contemporary Calgary as part of Exposure Photography Festival 2024. Thank you Beth Kane for all of your hard work in making this possible.
Marcel Duchamp suggests that the immeasurable gap, “the possible implying becoming — the passage from one to the other takes place in the infrathin”. Elyse Longair’s exhibition, Picturing the Infrathin, evokes Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin through collage with a specific focus on her flat seamless aesthetic where the thin space or gap between image fragments approaches (in)visibility. Each collage is created similarly: embracing subtly and carefully composed using a limited number of image fragments from her archive of popular knowledge source material, predominantly National Geographic magazine images from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Her work is durational, as Longair may wait years to find a near seamless and logical image match. In this infrathin space she creates, the viewer can imagine freely the possibility of the image, and the roles of picture making and imagination.
Elyse Longair is an artist, curator and image theorist from Lethbridge Alberta. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. Longair’s research focuses on collage history, collage as research creation and institutional strategies of collecting and curating collage. Her ‘simple image’ theory in collage redefines the role of images away from the overt-complexity that dominates our world, opening up new possibilities for imagined futures.
Longair’s research and practice go hand in hand. Several opportunities helped inform this exhibition with thanks to the many people who generously supported and helped her along the way.
o Spring, 2023, she participated in the Banff Artist in Residence, at The Banff Center for the Arts made possible by the support of The Peter MacKendrick Endowment Fund for Visual Artists. This opportunity allowed her to research collage at the Walter Phillips Gallery and focus on her studio practice where she created three of the collages for Picturing the Infrathin.
o Summer, 2023, with thanks to The David Edney Research Award, Longair studied at The Centre Pompidou where she researched Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin in conversation with Max Ernst’s collages.
o Fall, 2023, Longair presented The Infrathin in Collage, in Pausa: Infrathin Art History at The University of Arts Association of Canada Conference (UAAC) at The Banff Centre.
The recipient of this prestigious award is given the opportunity to present a solo show at the following year’s Exposure Photography Festival (At Contemporary Calgary). The award provides the emerging artist with a platform to show their work while furthering their professional practice and building their career within photography. Exposure mentors and supports the artist in developing their vision in the best possible way.
Exposure plays a pivotal role in arts programming in photography in the City of Calgary and throughout Alberta. Each year Exposure introduces exciting new programming that extends its reach and visibility and draws attention to Calgary and Alberta as the site of an active, growing, creative community in the field of photography.
The annual Exposure Photography Festival presents exhibitions that showcase photographic work by internationally renowned practitioners, alongside emerging and established talent from Alberta. The festival provides an exciting, innovative meeting place for photographers and art lovers to connect with one another, along with curators and photography professionals from around the world. Exposure is inclusive and participatory, a collaboration amongst members of the photographic community. Recent festivals have received over 900,000+ visits from Exposure’s community of local and international, arts and non-arts engaged individuals and audience members. The festival brings people together to celebrate photography and Alberta’s thriving creative communities.
Established in 2004, the Calgary/Banff Photography Society, the organization that produces Exposure, is a registered non-profit run by an enthusiastic Board of Directors who are devoted to photography.
The next edition of Exposure Photography Festival will take place during February 2023.