Aaron Friend Lettner Magic Hour
For seven years, artist Aaron Friend Lettner has been working on a photographic card deck, inspired by tarot – a cosmographic wisdom tradition that employs a rich, pictorial language to describe the soul’s journey into and out of form. His task has been to bring clarity to this tradition: He began with extensive study and contemplation of tarot, tracing its many tributaries through antiquity to the modern era. With camera in hand, he then sought out these ancient, archetypal images in the world around him. The result is a set of 78 cards that have been carefully selected from over 4,000 negatives.
In Magic Hour, select images from the deck are printed using photogravure plates, setting the stage for card readings that occur within the gallery space. Each encounter is an entirely new creation that unfolds both for the first and last time. When cards are drawn, images are evoked, brought into association, and held in unexpected relationships that open new pathways of meaning. Each reading lasts as long as a small candle burns – hence the name. Lettner expounds, “One can draw cards on their own, of course, but there’s something remarkable about the connection between strangers, so intimate and brief. When the mood is right, the world will hush, and the cards sing. It’s beautiful to behold.”
Readings are by appointment only and can be booked here.
Curated by Michelle Rosenblat
Aaron Friend Lettner makes unusual books. Working primarily with photography, Aaron traverses the crossways of culture, memory and place. His work is distinguished by its esoteric flair and he sees bookmaking as an opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration; a ritual act, where seen and unseen worlds elide. Alongside this, Aaron runs workshops with youth that consider different ways of telling a story through images, as well as hand-binding books. An intuitive bookmaker, Aaron received the inaugural Burtynsky Photobook Grant in 2016 for Doorways and a Canadian national book design award from the Alcuin Society in 2022 for anglepoise, which exhibited coast-to-coast across Canada, as well as in Japan and Germany. His books are held in special collections at the National Library of Germany (Leipzig) and The Rare Books Division of Simon Fraser University (Vancouver).