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Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

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Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura– “reciprocity of looking”, 2009 12ft high x 8ft x 8ft hemlock shed

Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura– “reciprocity of looking” is a hut that has been built and transformed into a permanent camera obscura. It was commissioned by Haliburton Forest Project an annual residency and symposium at the Haliburton Forest Reserve (a boreal forest in Northern Ontario). This walk in camera, invites the spectator to enter the darkened chamber and reveals the inverted image of the exterior woodland site onto the interior architecture. Environmental changes, movement by both human and animal in the exterior animate the projection.  Clouds move across the walls. Pine trees sway in the wind.

As an apparatus of focusing, recording and looking, the camera obscura slows down the process revealing potential gaps in our understanding of the real and the illusion. “reciprocity of looking” oscillates between image, architecture and illusion similar to the Cloche in situ and Cloche suite, which all act as transit points for an imagined Eden.