Bathed in Strange Light

Natalie Hunter

Part of Sun/Shade
Project Render by Natalie Hunter

Working in collaboration with the sun’s rhythms, Natalie Hunter’s photographs on the windows of The Bentway Studio (facing Canoe Landing Park) explore how ever-shifting sunlight shapes our experience of public spaces. As the sun moves throughout the day, translucent images cast down a colorful, slow-moving cinema.

As we orbit around the sun, the buildings and structures around us shape our experience of sunlight at street level, illuminating new details and perspectives with the changing seasons. In the CityPlace neighbourhood, marked by numerous high-rises, the light bounces off buildings to create ever-shifting patterns of light and shadow. How can photography offer a reflection on these fleeting moments in our environment, highlighting new ways of experiencing our public spaces?   

Bathed in Strange Light is a photo-based installation exploring notions of time and the sun’s shifting impact on urban settings. Through layered exposures, a process that parallels the sun’s behaviour and ephemerality, Natalie Hunter (Hamilton, ON) captures memories and subtle details found around Canoe Landing Park between the winter and spring seasons. Presented as translucent images affixed to The Bentway Studio’s western windows, the work performs as slow-moving cinema activated by the sun and revealing itself in new ways throughout the day.The images throw shifting pools of light into The Bentway Studio and its adjacent Terrace, creating latent images across its concrete surfaces. Playing with architecture, photography, and time, Hunter’s images scatter fragmented scenes of local infrastructure, plant life, and the sky as a continual meditation on the possibilities of the sun’s relationship with the built environment. 

Working in collaboration with the sun’s rhythms, Hunter’s images harness its transient power to see our public realm in new ways.

What to expect: 

  • Bathed in Strange Light is a photo-based installation guided by the rhythms of the sun. Audiences can encounter this installation across The Bentway Studio windows (facing Canoe Landing Park) each day from dawn to dusk.
  • The translucent images and architectural interventions throw colourful light across the site to provide comforting colour clusters around the interior atrium and exterior concrete surfaces.  
  • Benches are nearby for those who require seating.  
  • There are no public bathrooms at The Bentway Studio, but the Canoe Landing Community Centre next door has public bathrooms available during their opening hours. 

collaborators

project team

Fabrication: Westmount Signs

supporters

Commissioned by The Bentway, in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival

Sun-safety partner
David Cornfield Melanoma Fund

Supported by
Balsam Foundation
City of Toronto
TD Bank Group
and The Bentway’s growing family of friends and supporters

With help from partners at
Ontario Arts Council 
Government of Ontario
Save Your Skin Foundation

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