BARBARA STEINMAN: KEEPING TIME     

TrépanierBaer Gallery 
February 4 - March 4

TrépanierBaer Gallery is pleased announce its participation in the 2023 Exposure Photography Festival with three exhibitions: Barbara Steinman: Keeping Time, Geoffrey James: Trees, and Evan Penny: The Venetian Mirror. While distinct in their respective representations, these photographic bodies of work share concerns regarding the poetics of space, time, and memory, and how they are translated and expressed via the genre of photography. All of the works on view are replete in both the visual and philosophical senses, and should not be missed! 

For over forty years, Barbara Steinman’s work has consistently given shape to the migration of identities and symbols, as well as the intertwined pathways of time and history, and of individual and collective memory. From her critically acclaimed installations of the 1980s and 1990s, that were often site-specific and multimedia, to her more recent photographic series addressing the echo of time-based forms (the flight of a bird, a sound wave or a magnetic tape), through numerous public commissions, Steinman uses a great variety of media and materials to explore what she once called “layers of impermanence” in ways that are both sensitive and conceptual. 

Concerning the 26 works in the Keeping Time series of photographs, Barbara Steinman has noted: 

It started out as a way to mark time and then became about time itself. From September 2020 through January 2021 while in lockdown in Montréal and fearing there may not be flowers at all in the future, I began making images of flowers in various stages of their life cycles. This was a way to focus.

This selection of photographs is mainly of roses. They have a bittersweet beauty and what the French describe as jolie laide, an unconventional beauty. I set up a makeshift apparatus to control the framing no matter where the flowers fell. Some are arranged, others caught in random movement, some are suspended, others thrown down.

Surrounded by an uneasy and indeterminate black space, these are not flowers for special occasions in specific places. To me, these are not pictures of flowers as much as they are pictures of time.

Open: Tue - Sat: 11:00 - 17:00
Access: Location is wheelchair accessible. Exhibition is child friendly.
For more information see trepanierbaer.com

TrépanierBaer Gallery, 999 - 8 St SW, Suite 105, Calgary AB T2R 1J5