projects | Trudi Lynn Smith

image showing a glass plate with anthotype print underneath it — anthotype emulsion

Photodynamic Gardening. Making images with plants. Experimental ethnography. Leaves of stinging nettle, mashed up rose and bee balm petals, elderberry fruit.

Breath Camera: Artist Krista Caballero working with the breath camera — Breath Camera: Being worked by artist Krista Caballero, Oregon Desert Trail (2017).

The Breath Camera is a wearable camera form about impermanence: camera bellows, viewing screen, and a 3 x 9 foot darkcloth mix the fleshy with the fleeting.

Image of a photocollage showing Dawson's 1874 image of present day Waterton Lake with collaged butterflies by Trudi Lynn Smith — Composite photograph on archival rag paper. Folded, 22 x 30 cm, unfolded 71 x 109 cm. From a limited edition artist book containing the folded photograph and an academic text (published in *Anthropologica*), housed in an archival box.

Life and Death in Waterton Lakes National Park: A research program grounded in re-enactments of archival images to understand instability, ongoingness, and difference — what I consider as vital impulses in photography. Photographs are not only fixed as images or objects, but lively, entangled and emergent events (2003-present).

Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith video showing anarchival materiality in archives — Residue: Proximal Interactions. British Columbia Provincial Archives. Video Still (video 4 min 32 sec). Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy (2017).

Anarchival materiality within archives is an ongoing research-creation project that documents the generative force of entropy in archives. The force of molecular transformation, violence, displacement, and other human and non-human agencies render archival materials as fugitives, both eluding and driving preservation.

still from the 15 minute video studies for the perfect moment by Trudi Lynn Smith and Krista Caballero — Trudi Lynn Smith and Krista Caballero. Still from Studies for Making and Unmaking, 15 minute video loop (2017).

A 15 minute film loop that brings together digital and analogue archives into projections and performances. Making and unmaking encounters, curved by gusting winds, the squeak of technological breakdown, and the distortion of projections on paper.

installation of the drift camera at Art Gallery of Greater Victoria — Drift Camera (a continuous slow movement) with receiver inside. Installation at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2018). Camera, hand made bellows, wood, book binding tape, silk, salvaged binocular lens, satin velvet, driftwood, table, video installation.

A continuous slow movement (drift camera) is a camera reconstructed around the force of drift as a way to use photography to think about what escapes capitalist extractivism. A proposal for how we might forge different relations to photography.

The Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective explores the boundaries of anthropology and art through exhibitions, experimental installations, events and publications. Working since 2009, we’ve shown more than 150 artists in locations across North America.

detail images of exhibition finding aid by Trudi Lynn Smth — Finding Aid (2009-date).

An ongoing performed archive and exhibitions (2009-) documenting the productive failure of re-enactments of photographs in mountain environments of Canadian National Parks.

a photogaph showing a giant camera in 562 fisgard — 562 Fisgard: Giant camera for documenting the artist studio

Feminist art archives and a giant camera made for documentation of the artist studio. Infolding people into the back of the camera during invited events about photography.

film still by Jamie Drouin of Conduit Roundhouse — Conduit: Fingery camera. Film still by Jamie Drouin (2014).

A modified swing-lens Kodak Panoram broken and rebuilt to reconsider the interface between time and space in photographic embodiments.

Portable Camera Obscura 2009 — Portable Camera Obscura (2009).

Portable Camera Obscura is an immersive technology. It is a walk-in, room-sized camera – a tent that breaks into multiple pieces to refigure relations between people, images and materials.

Conduit Open Space showing mirrors reflecting the skylight in Open Space Gallery 2011 — Conduit: Open Space by Trudi Lynn Smith (in collaboration with Jamie Drouin) (2011)

Using the central skylight in a gallery as a starting point, Jamie Drouin and I direct frequencies into the Open Space Arts Society space using simple lenses, mirrors and antennae. (2011-2013).

Swimming in Lake Linnet, Waterton Lakes National Park 2013 — Video still. The impermanent return: Photography, protected areas, and the matter of Linnet Lake (2013).

A line in process by Jenaya Webb, an open water swimmer, anthropologist, and librarian, who I work with in parks and protected areas. This is experimental feminist praxis, fieldwork that prioritizes lake swimming as a way to explore the ‘thick description’ of embodied gestures, lines, abstraction in film and photography, the social life of rumours, and ‘swimmer’s itch’.