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, yet deeply toxic and scarred townsite, as it implies both destruction (oblivion) and a state of deliberate disregard, a willingness to utterly forget a space, a time, an identity along with all its trappings. It's weirdly reassuring to see nature gradually taking over, yet 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, greens take on a ghostly cast, blue skies become black, or garish fuchsia and magenta hues soak the landscapes. Too macabre?
