Durga Rajah & Tommy Calderon Fixations: Thoughts on Time
Featuring the work of emerging Toronto-based photographers Tommy Calderon and Durga Rajah, Fixations: Thoughts on Time explores conceptions of time in relation to photography. Using darkroom techniques, both artists engage the ways in which time is related to constructing and preserving an image, physically, psychologically, and culturally.
Rajah’s A Measure of Time: 3 Seconds (2020/2022) anticipates a future moment that will come to pass. Influenced by her experience in performance, in which she has learned about form, rhythm, presence, gesture, and affect, Rajah’s images trace the phenomenology of a body in motion. By leaving her analogue photographs chemically unfixed for controlled intervals, Rajah’s work anticipates its completion in the future. In its attempts to fix time, this project generates an archive of a forever-receding moment.
Calderon’s investigative series Dialectics (2022) reflects an attempt to grasp one’s constantly shifting position within the world. Using historical photographic processes, he questions how image making creates a sense of time within histories of meaning, acknowledging the refractive ability of an individual as an intuitive source of knowledge. In his work, Calderon explores the intersections of the real and imaginary, thereby navigating the cultural and social aspects of time as they relate to individual experience.
Curated by Kelsey Myler & Christina Oyawale
Presented by Artspace Gallery
Durga Rajah holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University. Interested in the formal and material aspects of photography, as well as in its potential as an expressive medium, Durga approaches photography as a way of making art, and has exhibited her work in Toronto and Vancouver. She is currently pursuing a Masters of Visual Studies in Studio Art at John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.
Tommy Calderon is a Toronto-based artist and photographer. Interested in the idea of realities, perception, and the ego, he explores the world in reference to historical non-fiction and the art-historical. A disbeliever in the common narrative, his work attempts to shift the routine of our everyday existence to the cathartic acts of self-reflection and independence.