Close to Home
CAMera Collective

Exhibition Dates: June 6, 2017 - June 10, 2017

The CAMera Collective (formerly UCFK) is pleased to present a photo installation exploring the theme, Close to Home, in the TRUCK Contemporary Art U-Hall Community Space. 

This exhibition investigates the concept of “home”, exploring different notions of place, grounding and perspective. As their home areas widen to areas outside of Calgary, the members of CAMera Collective work has evolved from past exhibitions without losing sight of the details that often get lost in larger narratives: Angela’s work in the exhibition encompasses both an intimate look at a sunrise in Mexico as well as a more voyeuristic perspective from her former downtown apartment. Cat’s photos are meticulous creations that remind the viewer of the connection between our bodies and our creations; our humanity that overlays the temples of urbanity: the high-rise offices, apartment towers and streets that typify a city. Melody’s work explores the theme with images that show their human subjects as being in a liminal state, of being close to home, but not quite there yet. 

Since 2010, CAMera Collective has been operating in collaboration, documenting urban environments from the unique perspectives of three photographers. Through exhibitions, photo walks and publications, our collective aims to make photography more present in Calgary, and start a critical dialogue about photography and image-making. Members of CAMera are Angela Inglis (Calgary), Melody Jacobson (Vancouver) and Cat Schick (Calgary).

In the eight years we’ve worked together as a collective, our techniques may have changed but our interests haven’t—photos that represent a finger held to the pulse of life in urban Canada.  We seek the unusual and the unnoticed in order to add to the understanding of a city’s diversity, with our subjects ranging from architecture, hidden communication and unintended meanings in signage and graffiti to traces of our human creatureliness and the biodiversity living in the city.

UCFK (now CAMera Collective) had its inaugural exhibition as part of the Sugar Shack Art Salon’s Debutantes’ Ball in Fall 2009. Photos on display included a range of themes; vaulting lines and cracks, architectural propensity, gritty graffiti, grid-lined people, speedy landscapes and phenomena in light.  

Since that time, we’ve had nine exhibitions of our work and we continue to search, learn and grow.  UCFK began as four anonymous photographers interested in exhibiting as a Banksy-like collective. In the ensuing years, one member of our group left to pursue his own projects and the remaining three have branched into different projects together, from yarn-bombing and performative crocheting on public transit, to further explorations of street photography.  Each photographer has developed her own voice while learning about and celebrating each other’s viewpoint in the collective.