The Visible Invisible
Yvette Hamilton
Gallery 3
view the roomsheet
Is it possible to see something that, by definition, is impossible to see?*
The Visible Invisible is an installation of expanded photography that uses black holes as a poetic device to explore identities shaped by adoption and diasporic existence, where not-knowing is an active lived-experience. This experience is mapped to the event horizon at the edge of a black hole, that contains the visible and the invisible, and the known and the unknown.
The works respond to the imagined concept of moving at the speed of light towards an event horizon, where the quest to see is affected by the warping of space, time, and light. A journey where the visible folds into the invisible. The installation explores the limits of the inherently visual medium of photography and attempts to create a speculative space to contemplate not knowing, not seeing, and to explore and materialise the invisible.
In my first experience under the red light of a darkroom, I witnessed latent images appear from void rectangles of photographic paper, and then also disappear into blackness under the swish of chemicals across material surfaces. My personal history is built upon a central mystery, thus my affinity for black holes, and their states of not seeing and not knowing are akin to my own lived experience. This central absence has led my expanded photographic practice to focus on the quest to see the unseen, to broach distance, and to explore the unknown. As Vilem Flusser states, I create “images in order to orientate (myself) in the world.**
* Katie Bouman, How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole, accessed August 16, 2020, 2:17.
** Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 10.
