Last Light is a haunting new series resulting from artist Christine Fitzgerald’s ongoing visual inquiry along the majestic St. Lawrence River as she engages with 19th discourses of natural history specimen collecting and in-progress environmental stewardship to protect vulnerable coastal places and species. Her work is centered on the exploration of our relationship with this extraordinary ecosystem with underlying themes of time, precarity, and loss, and the role that photography plays in shaping human experience with these universal aspects of life.
Fitzgerald’s images are formed from her meticulous resuscitation and mastery of obsolete photographic techniques, creating new hybrid modes of seeing by entwining wet plate collodion camerawork and specialized printing techniques such as pigmented impressions on platinotypes. Fitzgerald is interested in creating a tension in her out-of-time images - something that is not quite normal, somewhere between reality and fiction – images that makes you stop and think. Inspired by the spirit of innovation of early pioneers of photography, Fitzgerald adapts and reimagines obsolete photographic methods, often combining multiple techniques to create her unique aesthetic and push her medium’s expressive potential.
Many of the images of Last Light are cloaked in blue, referencing the diminishing capacity for completely dark night sky in the face of human industry and climate change. Fitzgerald’s blue twilight is an elegy to our present moment – caught between the “deep” time of life on Earth, and the advancing effects of the Anthropocene age that we are now experiencing. As the pictorialist Edward Steichen remarked in 1899, twilight is when things melt into each, when we become conscious of the movement of time.
Last Light connects the revival of obsolete technologies of seeing with the urgent imperative to witness the precarity of the natural world in our present time.
Free activity with the purchase of daily access to the Reford Gardens (purchase must be completed at registration). Members of the Amis des Jardins de Métis must present their valid membership card at the entrance to the site.
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Acknowledgements
The project was supported with grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Many organizations and people helped me throughout this project. I would like to recognize the incredible support from the following:
Dr. Lyne Morissette, Université du Québec à Rimouski, QC
Dr. Melissa Rombout, Amherst Island, ON
Dr. Jeff Ridel, The River Institute, Cornwall, ON
Dr. Leigh McGaughey, The River Institute, Cornwall, ON
Matt Windle, The River Institute, Cornwall, ON
Dr. Brian Hickey, The River Institute, Cornwall, ON
Stephanie Hildebrand, The River Institute, Cornwall, ON
Alexander Reford, Grand Métis, QC
Dr. André Desrochers, University of Ottawa, ON
Michelle Coyne, Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, ON
Joëlle Dufour, University of Ottawa, ON