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.

• Tommy Calderon
• Durga Rajah