Christopher Colville

The Dark Hours, Citizens, And Other Works

August 12 - October 7, 2017

Christopher Colville is an artist whose work pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium. These works are complicated: combining grace, beauty, violence, and the quintessentially American notion of manifest destiny. The photographs in The Dark Hours, Citizens, and Other Works, are the result of a traditional photographic process, the photogram. The light source that creates each of these luminous, haunting images is a controlled explosion of gunpowder. For the photographs in the Citizens series, Colville uses discarded practice targets found in the desert in Arizona near his home. Colville places the targets on light sensitive paper and ignites the gunpowder, illuminating the bullet holes and punctures exposing the light paper underneath. Colville describes them as “luminous shadows whose clarity refute their violent creation. These images grow from a response to this physical landscape that holds a compressed history of violence exacerbated by our uncertain times.” These photographs are unique objects, and are the result of a marriage of opposing ideas: fire and paper, beauty and destruction, light and dark, nature and man's presence. 

Recent awards include the Ernst Cabat Award through the Tucson Museum of Art, The Humble Art Foundations New Photography Grant, an Arizona Commission of the Arts Artist Project Grant, and an artist fellowship from the American Scandinavian Foundation. Colville’s work has been reviewed in publications including the Boston Globe, Art in America, and the L.A. Times.