Photos from a visit to Anyox, BC - a once-booming copper smelting community in remote coastal BC, now completely abandoned, eerie and surreal in the extreme. I visited here in 2023 along with nine other artists to explore and get inspired to create work for a collective exhibition to be held in Summer 2024.
The word "oblivious" came to mind while exploring the overgrown, still scarred townsite. While it loosely suggests destruction, a better definition is forgetting: a state of deliberate disregard for a space, a time, an identity along with all its trappings. It's weirdly reassuring to see nature gradually taking over, though I can't help but feel as though there's a message here that hasn't been fully learned.
For many of the photos, I chose to shoot using an infrared-converted camera, which captures not only the visible spectrum, but that range of light waves that we cannot see. Depending on how these are edited, green foliage takes on a ghostly cast, blue skies become black, or garish fuchsia and magenta hues soak the landscapes. I thought it suited this surreal, misremembered place.
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