"Everyday/Gifts/Artifacts/Souvenir (2025)”

How to decide what is important to keep or discard. When collecting becomes an act of personal agency, it rewrites a story of the new. 

A passionate photographer in Saskatchewan in the 70s whose photographic equipment is now a personal collection. "Everyday/Gifts/Artifacts/Souvenir (2025)” installation examines a personal relationship with a collection of photographic accessories, such as old cameras, images, photo slides, and stereoscopes. Through the collection of materials, especially inherited ones, an invisible link forms between the two people. According to Henri Lefebvre, “It is everyday life that measures and embodies the changes that take place somewhere else in the higher realms.”(Lefebvre 1961)

As a photographer, inheriting photographic equipment evokes a sense of silent care, excitement and connection between the items and me. Engaging with the historical knowledge that those materials hold feeds curiosity and deepens understanding of how someone’s everyday life becomes someone else’s. The invisible network offers a praxis-based understanding of where value lies and how time connects. As an artist, the accumulation forms a story in which finding becomes, over and over, a matter of traces of meaning and care. An ongoing search for artistic expression through inherited materials opens up possibilities of rewriting.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1961. "Clearing the Ground." In The Everyday, edited by Stephen Johnstone, 26-34. Documents of Contemporary Arts: The MIT press.