WINTERLONG
Deon Feng, Violet J & Felix Rapp
Opening Saturday May 10, 7 - 9 pm
at People (4277 Fraser St.)
I utilize the darkroom as both a space of production and refuge.
Well, production is probably a generous term.
In some ways it has become a place, perhaps the only one, where I allow myself to purposefully not understand something.
I want to believe that there is more to this place than what can be explained of it.
I’m not anti-science, but I am skeptical of the ways in which we try to legitimize every experience under the domain of knowledge. On a moody day, I might even think of it as the last room on Earth without language.
It’s a good place to feel like you are doing something, when you’re really just indulging in the present. I tell myself I’m working as I tap along that linoleum counter, trying to find my Pixies CD. Miraculously, it appears unscratched, doublestacked inside the Talking Heads Greatest Hits.
When winter made the nights long, I went there to look for a sense of agency. Sunset at 4PM? No problem, I’ve been in the dark all day anyways. I don’t believe in linear time and losing things; light just finds different ways to reoccur in my life.
You hold a strong conviction in the value of the analog. An unwillingness to accept the obsolescence of the silver gelatin print. I see myself in you: that beneath the cynicism, you care a lot, so much so it pains you sometimes.
I often say I’d like to haunt the darkroom. I think I already do. Some version of me does, at some place in time. I sense that things, as they are, will soon end. In time, my ghost and I will pack our bags, and move on.
One time, exiting the in-between room together, I asked you: “what’s that behind you?” and you were actually spooked. It’s childish, but I take pride in managing to scare a future ghost. Does she drink redbull too?
You say the darkroom is like a casino, which is perfect because I love gambling.
I remember the first time you brought bingo scratch tickets into the film developing area, and we won $5 that have yet to be redeemed. It’s waiting on that cork board alongside the forgotten goodbye card. The future always seems to be deferred.
For many months, my film didn’t advance a single frame. I felt no necessity to recount the present, as I welcomed the passage of the long winter.
Up until now you’ve never seen me with a camera. It’s true, so much of my time in Vancouver passed with a monochromatic ambivalence. Everything here was just a facility to process something more profound elsewhere.
We find common ground in our futile attempts to remember what we’ve decided was worth forgetting.
As it always goes in the twisted clairvoyance of leaving, I realized that we might be drawn to the darkroom simply for company. Funnily enough, now it almost seems like there is nowhere else but here: inside this old building surrounded by constructions of newness, sitting on the counter every Friday afternoon.
Will you be here for a while?
Text by Deon Feng and Violet J
