BICA School: Nocturama

Photography works from BICA Schoolers taken on their recent series of photowalks.

Nocturama includes works by Kayleah Aldrich, Nando Alvarez-Perez, Lucas Cook, Julia Dzwonkowski, Alexa Kanarowski, Nick Mass, Silas Rubeck, Palmer Segner, D. Sloan, & Kit Xiong.

Opening Reception January 24th, 7-10pm at BICA in the Project Space. On view until the end of February.

A NOCTURAMA houses nocturnal animals in simulated darkness. They are held captive in artificial twilight so that we onlookers may study them in their “natural” environment. 

Its occupants take on a fixed inquiring gaze, which German writer W.G. Sebald in his seminal work, Austerlitz, describes as “found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.” 

In conjunction with reading Austerlitz, BICA School went on “photo-walks.” The extra dark nights of winter set the backdrop for our collective inquisition. Our eyes penetrated the night like the fixed gazes of bats and aye-aye lemurs and birds called nightjars. 

We collected photographic matter—the camera acting as an analog of the eye—as we assumed our own places in the penumbral space, captive to the mission of photo-walking: to suspend the moment long enough to penetrate it. To be off our phones and on our feet, the wild things we are. We captured shadowy, hazy, off-the-cuff photos into a collective suspension, or at least a reason to grab beers on a Thursday night…

Included in the show are forced collaborations. Our collection of nocturnes (i.e., photos) were amassed into a pile, and each collaborator was asked to make selections regardless of photographer to use in their individual expressions of looking and thinking. Each piece represents the result of visual gaps in darkness: an inward gaze that looks beyond the nocturnal house we unusual creatures share.