For our final Project Gallery exhibition of 2024, the Alternator is pleased to present salmon arm, bc. december 25, 2021 by zev tiefenbach.
The images in this exhibition were shot on the evening of December 25, 2021. It was a cold evening on the onset of a meteorological event called a "polar vortex". A text-based first-person narrative is embedded on the images and weaves its way through the collection.
This text is rooted in tiefenbach’s experience on this particular day. Some of the writing considers the quotidian; wondering if his wife will make Chinese food for dinner or what movie they’ll go out to see later. Some of the writing contemplates larger issues like why he moved into town from the country or how indicators of climate change impact the trajectory of their family.
Cumulatively, the body of work seeks to re-imagine the landscape photograph.
Visually, this project is a story of displacement. As families, gather together inside to celebrate, he is alone outside documenting the largely white Christian world of middle-class Salmon Arm. The exteriority of the images stands in juxtaposition to the text which is a very interior monologue.
This body of work posits that the landscape is not a static, generalized moment, but a subjective time/place informed by teifenbach’s family history, his restless temperament, an unfolding climate crisis, questions of hetero-normativity in architecture, and moral questions of how to live in a world dominated by injustice.
tiefenbach seeks to create depictions of the landscape that resist the decontextualization of the photograph that otherwise proposes itself as whole. Instead, he acknowledges the photograph as part of an inter-connected discourse where indicators of climate crisis such as the polar vortex, the heat dome, and the atmospheric river live simultaneously in our consciousness. A landscape where his family's inability to raise a raspberry crop is informed by his son's need for brain surgery which speaks to why they now live in town.
Intrinsic to the storytelling is the visuality. The images are arresting and immersive creating a vivid engagement with place and time. tiefenbach wants to tell this fragment of his story rooted in the experience of a bitterly cold evening traversing through this middle-class residential neighborhood where Christmas lights mingle with dusk and blowing snow.
The quantity and materiality of the lightboxes help do this. Upon entering the darkened exhibition space, the viewer is transported. The glow of the lightboxes is like opening the door to a star-filled night, inviting viewers to share this evening walk with him. The 3-dimensionality of the boxes gives a depth to the viewing plane. Christmas lights punctuate the purple dusky sky through the backlit film. The streetlights cast an orange glow as the taillights of a car make their way down an otherwise deserted road. The light source itself gives the viewer pause to dwell within the image, absorb the nuances of the scene and read through the text as though they had come for a stroll with me on this cold evening in Salmon Arm.
So while, the sequence explores questions of displacement, the body of work is meant to be centered within his own experience. This intimacy mitigates his own sense of being "othered". Perhaps it also reminds the audience of being closer to themselves in the places they habitate?
On Friday, December 6th, from 6-8pm the Alternator will host a reception for both salmon arm, bc. december 25, 2021 and Three Way Mirror by Daniel Barrow, Glenn Gear, and Paige Gratland. Please join us to celebrate these fantastic artists, and catch a sneak peak at some of the work that Barrow, Gear, and Gratland will be creating during their residency in our Main Gallery. This event is free to attend and light snacks will be provided. RSVP on Eventbrite.
zev tiefenbach is a second-generation Canadian, currently based in Salmon Arm on unceded secwépemc territory. tiefenbach’s grandparents are holocaust survivors and tiefenbach was raised within a post-traumatic ethos where imminent catastrophe was superimposed over the quotidian. tiefenbach’s childhood was spent in a city where the dissonance between his middle-class surroundings and his own internalized sense of victimhood instilled a curiosity to explore the intersection between landscape, trauma and narrative. His work uses lens-based mediums, text, installation and constructions of the archive to describe his post-genocidal passage through the world. tiefenbach has a BFA from Concordia University and is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
Special thanks to Victoria Verge and Devyn Farr for production assistance.