CHRONICLES | TED HIEBERT
03.11.2006 | 04.16.2006
Canadian photographer Ted Hiebert’s experimental exploration of his chosen medium employs playful trickery to produce haunting imagery. His unique process excludes the traditional lighting sources on which photographers usually rely. Instead, Hiebert coats his own body in glow-in-the-dark paint and uses this self-generating luminescence to capture the figure on film. Shimmering like ghostly apparitions, these images appear watery and mobile due to the artist’s movement during the lengthy film exposure. In his artist statement, Hiebert explains that his photographs reveal both body and image to the film without a reliance on the usual principles of reflected light. These photographs are residual in a literal sense, for the image persists in the dark, due only to the glow.
While his practice revolves around self-portraiture, Hiebert escapes any notion of narcissism through his acts of transformation, which strangely renders the artist anonymous. Occasionally employing digital manipulation, Hiebert’s ambiguous portrayals morph even further into unrecognizable territory. I see my images, writes Hiebert, as metaphors for the persistent and paradoxical memory of a self that has disappeared into the technological unfamiliar. His recent series entitled Chimeras, a word that refers to the Greek mythological creature made from various animal parts, features curious hybrids that couple the human body with fur, paws, and bushy tails. The Chimeras make us ponder our evolutional past, and wonder what characteristics we share with our earthly co-inhabitants.
In his most recent body of work, the artist experiments with multiple images of his own body, suggesting the passage of time and the implication of many facets of his own persona. The title, Chronicles, leads us to speculation on possible narratives that may be enacted by the figures moving through the pictorial space of the photograph, one that the artist has described as a space in which technology and identity overlap and collide.
Ted Hiebert is completing his Ph.D. in the Humanities Doctoral Program at Concordia University. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Calgary (1999) and his B.F.A. in Visual Arts (Honours) from the University of Victoria (1997). His work has been shown in solo exhibitions across Canada and group exhibitions internationally in Costa Rica, Australia, Japan, Chile, and the United States; most recently Museum London (London, Ont.); Modern Fuel Gallery (Kingston, Ont.); ThreeWalls (Chicago); Galerie Sans Nom (Moncton); Art Gallery of South Okanogan (Penticton, BC) and in Le Mois de la Photo at Montréal Arts Intercultural (Montréal). Hiebert’s published writings include Hallucinations of Invisibility: From Silence to Delirium, in C Theory (2003), Becoming Carnival: Performing a Postmodern Identity in Performance Research (2003), The Lacanian Conspiracy in C Theory (2005) and The Medusa Complex: A Theory of Stoned Posthumanism in Drain (2005). He currently lives in Victoria B.C. where he maintains his studio practice.
Chronicles is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Curator: Joan Stebbins), funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the City of Lethbridge.
