VANISHING
Opens February 15, 2024
Vanishing explores our relationship with nature with themes of extinction, impermanence and loss. Inspired by photography pioneers, the exhibition considers historical museum specimen collections from the current perspective of the Anthropocene epoch. The work is based on Christine Fitzgerald’s artist residencies at the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Natural History Museum in England during 2023.
Vanishing constitutes an elegy, connecting our current time with evolutionary history and with the human quest for amassing knowledge through 19th century photography and natural history collection practices. The exhibition links technologies from the past and present, science and art, and promotes an awareness of the planet’s ecological precarity.
CHRISTINE FITZGERALD
Christine Fitzgerald is a photo-based artist from Ottawa, Canada. In her practice she merges historical photographic methods with modern technology, experimenting with old printing techniques and the manual application of pigment. Her experiments with the imperfections and permutations achieved from mixing current and obsolete photographic techniques allow her to push the boundaries of her medium and create a unique aesthetic, engaging viewers in the historical foundations of photography. Fitzgerald is a graduate of the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa, and Acadia and Dalhousie Universities.
Fitzgerald has been the recipient of grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and numerous awards, including the 2016 International Fine Art Photographer of the Year from the Lucie Foundation, and a category winner for the 2017 the International Julia Margaret Cameron Award for women photographers. Her work has been featured by the CBC, The Washington Post, and the National Geographic. In 2020, her artwork was at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. as part of the featured exhibition, New Light: Canadian Women Artists. In 2023, she won the prestigious City of Ottawa Karsh Award, for her “outstanding body of work and significant contribution to the artistic discipline in a photo/lens-based medium”.