Souvenirs

Vanessa Holyoak & Antoine Chesnais August 17 – September 17, 2023

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. — Susan Sontag, On Photography

The Souvenirs are relics of the present, specimens for a speculative future. Three vitrines enclose photographs of still life arrangements, lit by natural northern light in the style of 17th-century Dutch painting. Realized in the Scottish Highlands during wintertime, along the shores of Loch Long at Cove Park artists residency, these ephemeral assemblages were photographed with an iPhone on a black trash bag backdrop and printed on aluminum plaques. The images (souvenirs* in both the English and French language senses), constituted of found site-specific objects and the artists’ daily detritus, are indexes of the photographers’ presence at a particular place and time. Preserved in terrarium mise-en-scènes of black gravel, Scottish stones, and sea glass, a vernacular gesture is made coyly monumental, poised behind glass — stubbornly, if naïvely, refuting time’s passage and its course toward obsolescence: of the human and ecology alike.

An installation submerged in semi-obscurity leads the way to the room of Souvenirs, reminiscent of the dimly lit galleries of a natural history museum. By the entrance, a table and chair are left empty; a lamp, an ancestral poem* scrawled in an open notebook, and a radio playing live Scottish radio emanate traces of life in their custodian’s absence — a museum guard on a bathroom break? The artists? Or a more definitive disappearance? Tucked into a back nook are metal shelves of gleaned object-specimens from the artists’ fictional “field work” in the Scottish environs that echo the objects seen in the Souvenir photographs: fern leaves, a tea bag, a Ziploc specimen collection bag of “Scottish mist” (in a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s famed Air de Paris), among others. A path of gravel and rocks, interspersed with three videos on monitors, mimics the stony substrate of the terrarium microcosms, in turn a staged imitation of the craggy coastal terrain of the Highlands. The videos’ banal abstractions channel a site-specific speculative fiction sensibility crafted from the spaces in and around the artists’ residency studio in Scotland — images of a UFO-like apparition, pebbles disappearing into a loch, and an ambiguous, darkly sparkling surface take shape from everyday phenomena such as the reflection of light in a window or shining on the bathroom floor. Their titles, Nightfall at 15:37:16 , Nightfall at 15:37:26, and Nightfall at 15:37:56 (corresponding to the time of nightfall on the days they were recorded), archive the shortening days of the darkest week of the year. They demarcate a transitional space, paving the way to an uncertain future.

The Souvenirs, staged in the gallery’s back room, center a meditation on the medium of photography and its inherent relationship to death and disappearance, drawing a parallel to the environment in the context of its own erosion in the Anthropocene. Drawn from a pool of specimens (their titles reflect this archival impulse: Souvenir H1811, Souvenir H1817, and Souvenir H1833, with “H” denoting “Highlands”), the vitrines function as time capsules for a future marked by human and non-human disappearance amidst near-certain planetary disaster. These time capsules, with their traces of human presence, will indeed survive the human. Using only found materials and detritus, Holyoak and Chesnais created the photographed arrangements in their residency studio, choosing iPhone photography to document them due to its vernacular and quotidian quality as the go-to medium for representing fragments of everyday life. This kind of “souvenir” — low-res, uncalculated, bordering on the abject — is a subaltern response to the commodification of memory: it is not the beautiful Instagram post that over-saturates our visual culture, but a haphazard, random arrangement of found objects, both human-made (products of international consumption — a wasted film roll, a used teabag) and natural (a dried-out fern leaf). It is, nonetheless, specific to the site where it was assembled, irreproducible, and unique — an indexical trace of the place and time of its making. If a photograph is something that triggers or provides the stimulus to recall a memory, these images have the same fundamental function as the picturesque landscape photograph in that they take us back to a specific time and place, albeit along an alternative route. The Souvenirs also serve as reflections or records of ancestral displacement in time and space, as Holyoak’s paternal great-grandparents hailed from Ayrshire, Scotland (before immigrating to Canada), not far from the site where Holyoak and Chesnais produced these images, generations later.

Souvenirs is a fictional exhibition staged from a speculative future. It holds the arbitrary artifacts of our present, artifacts of a future past: photographs of ephemeral assemblages of found and used material, footage of everyday phenomena cast in an unusual light, washed up on an artificial shore. It documents an ecological present marked by human traces, witnessed with the surreal nostalgia of a not-so-far-off future: the nostalgia of images in a disappearing landscape.

*In English, a souvenir is a keepsake brought home by which to remember a far-off place; in French, it is the word for a memory.

*The poem penned in the open notebook, The Last Day of the Year, was written by Holyoak’s ancestor, early 20th century Scottish poet Elizabeth Ramsay. It was published in her poetry collection, A Garland of Verse, in 1904.

Antoine Chesnais (b. 1984) and Vanessa Holyoak (b. 1994) are a Los Angeles-based, Franco-American-Canadian artist duo working across installation, photography, sculpture, and video. They construct uncanny, minimalist environments that allude to mediation and memory, intimate and ecological loss, and the cognitive overload of the present. Their work has been shown in Mexico City, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, and in Los Angeles at

AU PAIR, Harkawik, Eastside International, Human Resources, and the California Institute of the Arts, among other venues. They attended Cove Park international artists residency in Helensburgh, Scotland in 2021 and Casa Lü residency in Mexico City, Mexico in 2022. Their work has been supported by multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. Chesnais holds a diploma in Photography from l’École des Gobelins and works as a landscaper. Holyoak holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Writing from CalArts, a BA in French Literature, Translation, and Philosophy from Barnard College, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Media & Culture at the University of Southern California. She is the author of a novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, published by Sming Sming Books in May 2023.