Bianca Van Leeuwen
Canaday Gallery, 4th–22nd November 2009
Bianca van Leeuwen’s monochrome pinhole photographs explore themes of place, perception, memory and repetition. Their well-defined horizon lines, and emphasis on roads, bridges and buildings, reveals a human urge to impose order on nature, while also exposing this drive as evidence of nostalgia for an end or object that is fundamentally unrealizable. Blurred and grainy, van Leeuwan’s dreamlike pictures, developed on glass plates, seem like remnants of a barely-remembered, vintage film, or aged snapshots documenting journey that never had a clearly defined destination. As sequential riffs, sounding out a common air of desolation, van Leeuwan’s images hint, also, at a futile and obsessive process of recovery or reclamation that leaves one stranded in the space of memory; trapped in a vision of the past that fragments even as one struggles to bring it into focus.