Maegan Hill-Carroll and Robert Kleyn at Wil Aballe, Brussels

This exhibition brings into dialogue two Vancouver photographers of different generations and sensibilities. Through distinctive approaches to working with cameras, they share an approach to the act of looking as a decidedly conditional, complex process. The close scrutiny elicited by their photographs reveals that what is depicted is not immediately visible. Whether wielding a camera in domestic and urban spaces, or experimenting in the studio with photographic equipment, Hill-Carroll and Kleyn share an appreciation for the enigmas of the mundane world. Their observations breathe life into the overlooked and previously invisible, in ways that tease out the limits of human and mechanical vision to question what is actually photographable. Nevertheless, they embrace the phantasmagoric effects of illumination as subject matter in itself, and as evidence of the passage of time. The absent bodies inhabiting these photographs: soap, a bus shelter, ripped paper, a lens, fleshy material, leave traces of bodily residues. Hill-Carroll and Kleyn’s evocative images emerge from multisensory and performative experience, revealing that everyday things have no lack of poetic qualities.

Hill-Carroll’s intimate pictures turn unremarkable scenes into something strange, and extraordinary. Allowing for atmospheric blurs and skewed perspectives, sometimes from a pinhole camera, she records fleeting incidents. These visual effects suggest retinal afterimages, as with an orb of refracted daylight on concrete, and an accidental camera obscura projection on a ceiling, for example. Her images are often haunted by ghosts and spirits reminiscent of an ectoplasm visitation in spirit photographs. Yet her interventions are subtle, everyday occurrences, just the nature of things found in dew ghosts, tar bubbles and ice holes. In Hill-Carroll’s photographs it is the ephemeral forces of natural phenomena – weather, decay, ice, light – that take on a palpable, almost mystical, presence. She embraces blurred obfuscations from blasts of sun and streaks of moisture where light appears as a ghostly performer. A sense of wonder is further emphasized by coloured wood frames of the small, so-called magic boxes that seduce us into examining the curious spaces. Hill-Carroll’s primary interest “lies with revealing phenomena beyond the rational and the science of optics…and matters unseen.” Her earthly perceptions are extensions of bodily senses, more in line with the notion of unconscious optics opening up a psychic condition. Her concern with “the cognitive dissonance of photography’s capacity to both reveal and conceal” is vividly expressed in the somatic spaces of her pictures. If, indeed, technology may have colonized our visual senses, then her intimations provide a welcome return to embracing the mysteries of photographs.

Kleyn interprets the impact of photographic technologies on perception more directly with a focus on retrieving fugitive performances of light interacting with mundane objects readily on hand. In the Apparatus series, he documents projected light conditions, bringing haptic observation into dialogue with photographic apparatuses. Details of projectors, film celluloid and lenses are transformed into otherworldly, even planetary mysteries, as if technology were some mystical phenomena emanating from, for example, a glowing lens hovering in black space like an electronic moon. Kleyn’s studio experiments with image -making tools often involve various mediations: a photograph of a roll of film is projected to become another photograph, then scanned with the original. Despite his conceptualist restraint, his photographs are invariably entwined with temporal contingencies. Minutely recorded through scanning, a blob of shampoo, for example, becomes an unrecognizable abstract pattern. Notably, while many of Kleyn’s images look like abstract constructs, they instead result from a direct, concrete depiction of an object interacting with light. Full of perceptual conundrums, his pictures reveal the optical limitations of both analog film and digital scans while provoking an understanding of the limits of human perception, and imagination as well. He exploits the vagaries of micro and macro associations, whereby a small puncture on a dark ground appears as a star in the night sky, and at the same time, a luminous portal into expansive otherworldly realms.

Kleyn is always attentive to the impact of photographic grain and resolution, particularly in his pictures of bars of soap, in which out-of-focus, abstract forms merge with the intricate details of documentary record. This ongoing series, currently at well over 100 images, is a type of social archive of surrogate portraits. Well- used soaps floating over black backgrounds resemble museum displays of anthropological artifacts. Inspired by Francis Ponge’s 1967 prose-poem, Soap, in which soap is a charged allegory for spiritual survival in a poisonous world, each richly-textured ‘character’ carries poignant associations as well. These documents of ubiquitous involuntary sculptures also nod to Brassai’s 1930s photographs of croissants, rolled paper scraps and “the morphological happenstance of oozed toothpaste”. Kleyn describes these sensory objects as “humble servants, waiting for our hands that become unwitting sculptors, and shaped by bodily contours create a deformation that is subtle, gradual, almost unnoticeable.”

Intentionally modest in size and visual spectacle, the compelling impact of the photographs in this exhibition are fueled by hauntings from beyond photographic depiction and at times take on planetary associations. Seeing what lies in view is not necessarily accurate perception. In a restrained manner, both artists assert that technology-driven acts of looking are inevitably entangled with a human gaze, rewriting what lies before it as well as various temporal contingencies. This call to question, what information photographs have the capacity to contain, is ever-more urgent as the race to absorb our complex world through digital image overload accelerates.