PASSAGE
49.3428° N 123.3051° W
Early morning September 14, 2015
through the night of September 14, 2016
Sept 30th- Oct 19t
A journey beyond measured time, toward the slower time of forests, stone and sea, told through a year of photographs.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Passage Island sits at the entrance to Howe Sound on the south coast of British Columbia. Accessible only by private boat, it is an island I came to know from a distance during my regular ferry crossings between Bowen Island, where I live, and the mainland. For an entire year, I photographed the island from roughly the same spot in the middle of the Sound, every time I made the crossing—once on the morning ferry, and again on the return journey in the afternoon or evening.
What began as simple repetition became duration, and duration became a way of seeing. We have learned to think of time in units: seconds, minutes, hours, days. But nature keeps time differently, if it “keeps” it at all. Its rhythms are smooth, continuous, and without the boundaries we draw across them.
The collection of photographs explores the passage of time on three scales.
The paired photos mark my own daily comings and goings. Some photos are missing: sometimes I overnighted on the mainland and sometimes I was traveling abroad and far away for days. There are weekends when I stayed at home.
In the changing light and colour of the skies from one photo to the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, there is also a sense of our long passage around the sun. It was a leap year, incidentally. This orbit seems to be near the limit of human perception: a year is hard to grasp all at once but the volume of photographs lined out along the walls here give a sense of it.
And finally these photos hint at the passage of time for things like trees and rocks and oceans. This kind of time appears like a mirage at sea, a projection of something just over the horizon, below the line of sight, not directly perceptible but not entirely beyond sensation either. A time-lapse would not capture this because it compresses—makes shallow—this deep time. Time lapses, that it, it is lost. We see the effect of time but not time itself.
Time, I think, has to be felt, either by taking a long, long look at an island or by walking along the walls of the gallery, viewing these photographs one at a time.
Brad Carter is an emerging photographer based on Bowen Island, British Columbia. His work explores the relationship between time, place, and perception, often through patient, repeated observation.
His first major project, Passage, is a year-long study of Passage Island in Howe Sound, photographed daily from the ferry crossing between Bowen Island and the mainland. Though the photobook has been complete for some time, this exhibition marks the first time the work is being shown publicly in its entirety.
In 2023, his photograph of a cigarette seller in his booth in Ebisu, Tokyo, was included in the juried exhibition Frame Tokyo. Passage is his first solo exhibition.
ABOUT
ABOUT THE WORK
Passage exists first as a book, a year’s worth of photographs taken of Passage Island from the same vantage point, every time the artist crossed Howe Sound between Bowen Island and the mainland. Each day is represented by a pair of images, one taken before midday and one after, forming a steady rhythm of looking that reveals the subtle and profound shifts of light, weather, and season. Although the photographs were all taken on an iPhone, they are presented in the format of Polaroids, for the way the slowly developing image pulled from the camera recalls the slowly developing perception of Passage Island itself. Some images have been edited—not to alter the landscape, but to evoke the experience of a particular crossing or to render the island more impressionistically. Some
For this exhibition, the pages of the book are unfolded and carried into the gallery. Installed in sequence along the walls, they create a horizontal timeline that encircles the room. Visitors are invited to walk through the year, slowly, step by step, as another way of feeling time: not as something abstract or mechanical, but embodied, immersive, and continuous.
