Samuel de Lange: Between the Salt of the Sun and the Light of the Sea

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Samuel de Lange, "Between the Salt of the Sun and the Light of the Sea," 2020

OPENING RECEPTION January 10 from 7PM - 11PM

TRUCK Contemporary Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition from Samuel de Lange. Between the Salt of the Sun and the Light of the Sea departs from an open-ended research proposition: what could be revealed by taking the histories of salt and photography into mutual consideration?

In a world increasingly defined by borders and the shifting forms of communication and capital that cross them, Between the Salt of the Sun and the Light of the Sea suggests histories of salt and photography as entangled apparatus that can offer new ways of considering the affect in the relationships, systems, and exchanges that form our being and belonging in the world.

Drawing from Georges Perec’s idea of the “infraordinaire”—things so ordinary that they go unnoticed—the exhibition seeks to locate a criticality in things unseen, unrealized, overlooked or forgotten.  Research for this exhibition is prompted by three specific points of reference: exchanges around the time of the publication of Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, detailing the methodologies and usefulness of mass reproducible images; a found copy of Garnett Laidlaw Eskew’s postwar book Salt: The Fifth Element, which presents the development of the salt industry as a way of understanding the post-war rise of the American power state; and a former salt mine in the United Kingdom that now functions as a storage site for the National Archives. The exhibition presents materializations that arise in the affective gaps, overlaps, and tangents prompted by this ongoing research while creating contact zones that might offer opportunity for criticality in a forum for the same.

Samuel de Lange (Dutch-Canadian, born Woodstock, Canada) works with combinations of photographic material, moving image, cast objects, and furniture. Developed through a wide range of interests, but often using specific moments, places, or objects as points of departure, his work results in site-sensitive responses that are guided by considerations of the intersections between mass media, collective histories, social memory, and shared space. His recent research has looked at how ideas/acts of “preservation” can oscillate between conflicting forces of care and control.