Between the Salt of the Sun and the Light of the Sea
Samuel de Lange
Samuel de Lange, The Surgeon (Murex), digital inkjet print, 2020.
Exhibition Dates: January 10, 2020 - February 2, 2020
Opening Reception: January 10, 2019 7PM to 10PM
In a world increasingly defined by borders and the shifting forms of communication and capital that cross them, Between the Salt of the Sun and the Light of the Sea suggests histories of salt and photography as entangled apparatus that can offer new ways of considering the affect in the relationships, systems, and exchanges that form our being and belonging in the world.
Drawing from Georges Perec’s idea of the “infraordinaire”—things so ordinary that they go unnoticed—the exhibition seeks to locate a criticality in things unseen, unrealized, overlooked or forgotten. Research for this exhibition is prompted by three specific points of reference: exchanges around the time of the publication of Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, detailing the methodologies and usefulness of mass reproducible images; a found copy of Garnett Laidlaw Eskew’s postwar book Salt: The Fifth Element, which presents the development of the salt industry as a way of understanding the post-war rise of the American power state; and a former salt mine in the United Kingdom that now functions as a storage site for the National Archives. The exhibition presents materializations that arise in the affective gaps, overlaps, and tangents prompted by this ongoing research while creating contact zones that might offer opportunity for criticality in a forum for the same.
Samuel de Lange (Dutch-Canadian, born Woodstock, Canada) works with combinations of photographic material, moving image, cast objects and furniture. Developed through a wide range of interests, but often using specific moments, places, or objects as points of departure, his work results in site-sensitive responses that are guided by considerations of the intersections between mass media, collective histories, social memory, and shared space. His recent research has looked at how ideas/acts of “preservation” can oscillate between conflicting forces of care and control.
de Lange is the recipient of grants and awards from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and the Bank of Montreal and has participated in residencies, solo, and group exhibitions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe. He studied Studio Art and Art History at the University of Guelph, and received his Master of Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2019. He currently lives and works between Toronto, ON and Glasgow, UK.
This exhibition is made possible thanks to support from the City of Toronto through Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
