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Photography captures brief, fleeting moments in time, often hiding context and the subject’s circumstances. This exhibition, with installations by Garth Amundson and Pierre Gour, explores how lack of background can erase entire histories and cultures. These skewed snapshots are especially evident in historical Victorian photos, when society strived to bury queer culture.

In several of the exhibit’s installations, the artists manipulate vintage photos by removing subjects’ faces and eyes. They invite viewers to project themselves into the images to consider their own gender construction. In another installation, the artists combine portraits of two men, with one turned on his head, to disrupt conventions and consider what historical photography omits.

Amundson and Gour complicate studio portraits and commercial images, which flatten away the murkiness of life with their cleanliness and idyllic conventions. They use the lens of their current moment and circumstances to imagine what other ideas might be teased from these photos.

Buy at Village Books in Bellingham, WA