▲ SCOPE WITH BIRCH CONTEMPORARY @ BOOTH E02
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▲ ART 14 WITH CHRISTOPHE GUYE GALERIE @ BOOTH LF8
▲ SOLO EXHIBITION @ CHRISTOPHE GUYE GALERIE ( ZURICH )
BREAKING LIGHT
Opening: October 24 · 2013 ⁄ 6–8pm
Exhibition: October 24 – November 30 · 2013
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“I know of a greek labyrinth which is a single straight line.”
(Jorge Luis Borges)
James Nizam opens his first European exhibition, this fall, with an appropriately introductory selection of work; but also one indicative of a practice’s advancement through a kind of return. Culling from his last body of photographic images, “Curious Perspectives,” Nizam reveals a new series to run alongside it, producing an important contrast that reads like a conversation’s extension, or even completion, regarding the intrinsic qualities of his chosen medium.
Nizam employs the eye — and as an extension of this, the aperture — as his pivot point. Whether exploring the optics, breaking points, and possible patterning that extends outwards from its foundation; or reflecting on the artful possibilities that lie within its mechanism, Nizam returns us to an essentialist conversation on the still-evolving photographic form.
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Christophe Guye Galerie
Dufourstrasse 31
8008 Zurich, Switzerland
www.christopheguye.com
▲ SOLO EXHIBITION @ YUKON ARTS CENTRE ( YUKON )
TRACE HEAVENS
Opening: September 12 · 2013 ⁄ 6–8pm
Exhibition: September 12 – November 16 · 2013
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The works of Trace Heavens mark the results of James Nizam’s architectural interventions and studio-based explorations made to channel and record light. Where his earlier series Anteroom transformed abandoned rooms into straightforward pinhole camera obscuras, Nizam’s use of a perforated room is now less concerned with bringing the outside world in and recording it, than it is with using the light of that world to produce starkly beautiful visual effects that verge on the palpable. In Shard of Light, and the Thought Forms, Nizam harnesses the procession of the sun using jury-rigged setups that capture and manipulate sunlight into sculptural form. The resulting light sculptures establish a correspondence between room and camera as light capturing structures and extends it in time and space to the capture of solar phenomena within ancient astrological observatories such as those at Chaco Canyon or Xochicalco. The archaeological and pseudoscientific nature of Nizam’s solar recordings push the specific concerns of photography beyond the ordinary purview of the medium, working with light to establish poetic connections between the cosmos, photographic apparatuses, architecture, perception and the mind.
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Yukon Arts Centre
300 College Dr.
Whitehorse, Yukon
▲ SOLO EXHIBITION @ BIRCH CONTEMPORARY ( TORONTO )
CURIOUS PERSPECTIVES
Opening: June 13 · 2013 ⁄ 5 – 8pm
Exhibition: June 13 – July 20 · 2013
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Curious Perspectives, James Nizam’s third solo exhibition at Birch Contemporary, opens with a title aptly borrowed from French mathematician Jean François Niceron’s 1638 treatise on the practical applications of perspective. As in La Perspective Curieuse, Nizam’s work demonstrates an affinity for natural magic: an alchemy of position and perspective, light and shadow, and of temporality, sequence, and technique. Just as Niceron held that optics are as much concerned with illusion as they are with the distinct properties of light, Nizam’s work occupies a complex physical and temporal space where perspective is both, a precise science and a natural magic. It is exactly here, in Nizam’s own view, that the unique position of the lens in time and space may capture our curiosity. “Curious”, then, does not regard the optical trick but, instead, evokes imaginary perspectives; immaterial and material coalesce in a series of photographic works – each carrying a quality of the impossible.
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Birch Contemporary
129 Tecumseth Street
Toronto Canada M6J 2H2
www.birchcontemporary.com