Galerie Nicolas Robert

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present “An instant used to be three minutes long”, from Anthony Vrakotas. The exhibition will run from November 30, 2013 to January 25, 2014. Vrakotas is currently graduating with his Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University. He exhibited at Warren G. Flowers Gallery in March 2013 and at Parisian Laundry with Collision 8 in 2012.

“In An instant used to be three minutes long, I explore my own past through the lens of instant photography. By appropriating obsolete technologies and applying them anachronistically to my own life and memory, I raise questions about how we perceive and interpret our own experiences through evolving technologies. What role do aesthetics of reproduction play in defining our memories? What part do today’s technologies play in recreating our past? And in what way do these histories define us as a culture?

With old camera in hand and scavenged expired film loaded, I walk through the streets of my youth looking for memories. When meaningful places or memories manifest themselves I shoot a picture. I don’t compose it, reshoot it or edit it in anyway. All images once taken are put aside and later printed as they are, in order to create a separation between the emotional content of the image and its greater conceptual potential. Later, with a massive collection of images, divorced in time and place from their source, I recompose new narratives and in doing so play a creative role in defining the past.

The seven images selected for the exhibition give us a glimpse into the inherent difficulty of dealing with our past. Almost nothing of the memory remains. What we are confronted with are the degenerated artifacts of the technologies we depended on to capture and preserve these moments. These painted fields of gold and red, scratched and caked with dried chemicals, harken back to a materiality absent from contemporary digital technology and yet still routinely evoked in the present aesthetic vocabulary of the photographic instant.” – Anthony Vrakotas

* Please note that the gallery will be closed from December 22, 2013 to January 14, 2014.