A new exhibit at the City Hall Art Gallery is shedding light on the dark.
“Night for Day: Road Crews” – a photographic exhibit by London-born artist Ramses Madina – explores the nightlife of road workers as they labour well after the sun goes down.
“There’s so much that happens at night these days since the introduction of artificial light,” says Madina. “We’ve been able to create a 24-hour economy.”
Madina’s work is two-fold: an exploration of the different uses of artificial light and the “invisible workforce” that operates by it.
Nighttime roadwork illustrates this dependent relationship well, he says.
Without the people who swap their day for night – and the light by which they do it – road construction would interfere with daytime traffic and activity.
Madina says people sometimes take safe roads for granted. Art often bring things that would otherwise go unnoticed to light, he says. In this case, the routine tasks of nighttime road crews.
While filming his previous work – a nine-minute, black and white film called Farmer’s Requiem about the decay of farms in northeastern Ontario – Madina says he came across a lot of road crews and began to wonder about them.
For Madina, nightshift work has strong social implications. Many art projects explore what it feels like to live “counter to the rest of the world.”
“Night for Day” explores the same idea, but it isn’t the entire focus of Madina’s work.
“(The exhibit) is very much about the relationship between photography and light and existence,” he adds.
Using only the artificial light onsite, Madina captures the workers’ candid moments of fatigue and contemplation.
His black and white images highlight these ordinary moments, creating haunting scenes that capture his subjects in an almost dreamlike state.
Each of the nine 50 x 50 cm photographs has its own spotlight. Working with the artificial light already present in the photographs, the gallery lighting makes the ordinary, extraordinary.
The exhibit includes a six-minute colour film that shows various stages of nighttime roadwork with music by Montreal-based composer, Christian Rivest.
“It’s a really well put-together show,” says Thierry Black, who attended the opening reception on Nov. 17. For Black, the exhibit is a testament to the effort of smaller galleries to display work well.
Each year the gallery – run by the Ottawa Public Art program – displays around six exhibits, chosen from the city’s own fine arts, archival and heritage collections and submissions from artists, says gallery co-ordinator Meaghan Haughian.
Exhibits are chosen by peer jury members from the local arts community including professional artists, curators and arts administrators.
Each submission includes a written proposal and portfolio of 10 works. The program receives about 100 to 130 artist submissions every year, she adds.
“Night for Day” is the first part of Madina’s series on artificial light. His other projects include a documentary about the production of steel, which took Madina 5,000 feet underground with ore-miners in Sudbury, Ontario.
Madin's work will also explore welding, drawing a connection between the intensity of the welder’s torch to that of our own sun.
The exhibit runs until Jan. 8, at the City Hall Art Gallery. Madina will answer questions about his work at an "artist talk" on Dec. 4 at 2 p.m.