Zachary Ayotte: BAMF
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Latitude 53 10130 100 Street NW, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 0N8
Zachary Ayotte, "BAMF," 2019
Opening reception for members and guests // Friday Feburary 8, 7 pm
Zachary Ayotte in conversation with Ted Kerr // Thursday April 18, 6 pm
The Garage is a space to support and stimulate the emergence of new voices through the commission of new work by local emerging artists. Latitude 53 is honoured to exist in a building that was a safe gathering space for queer communities from 1969–2012, and The Garage (as this part of the building was for a time known) pays homage to the history of this place, as does Zachary Ayotte’s inaugural project. In the space, Zachary Ayotte’s new work engages in remembrance and rethinking of the gradual disappearance of queer spaces in our city.
BAMF is a series of human-scale images of bodies slipping into the aether, shot on a medium format camera with black-and-white film. As they vanish, they leave behind trails of dust, the black air closing in and swallowing the spaces they leave behind. Ayotte is interested in the relationship of the physical—bodies and the spaces they inhabit—to our conceptual and political landscapes. When these places don’t stay open, how do they live on, and how do they inform our other approaches to community?
BAMF takes its name from an onomatopoeia first used in X-MEN comics in the 1970s. The word, which describes the sound of air rushing in to fill the space of an absent body, speaks to a sense of disappearance and to the pressures that shift imperceptibly in the spaces around and within us.
About the artist
Zachary Ayotte was born in Yellowknife, NT in 1981. He graduated from the University of Alberta in 2004 and went on to study photography at the North Alberta Institute of Technology.
His work is interested in the relationship between what is seen and what is invisible. He uses bodies and spaces to explore power and repression in various forms. Often focused on singular figures in dark or intimate surroundings, Ayotte limits the viewer's access to information. Through these minimal compositions his work tries to limit the viewer's ability to see beyond the surface of an image.
In 2012, he helped self-publish At the Same Time with five other artists in Canada and the United Kingdom. He has exhibited work at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Latitude 53, SNAP gallery and as part of the Contact photography festival.
Ayotte lives in Edmonton, AB.