Adam Swica’s photographs under the series title Ellipsis probe the durability of the photographic gesture, or capture, in the making of a photographic object. Through the mechanisms of multiple and time exposures, Swica uses light, movement, and duration to coax dimensional planes within the photographic frame.

Shooting on film, the artist physically shifts sheets of coloured construction paper and inscribes the repeated movements onto a single negative. Variations in opacity and translucency are determined by the durational light of a long exposure. Each photograph contains anywhere from 20 to more than a 100 gestures, with successive captures potentially infringing or obliterating preceding ones. Swica’s methodology involves memory at the level of cataloguing the sequence of shots, and chance at the level of comingled photographic events. The in-camera building of the image is an active yet unpredictable construction, situated somewhere between an automatic drawing and an architectonic structure.

With the unfolding of motion compressed into one frame, repeatedly recorded elements emerge as complex geometries. Their trajectory is reconfigured as an ethereal, contiguous whole, a volume sculpted by time and light.

• Adam Swica graduated from The Ontario College of Art (1977), specializing in Experimental Arts and Photography. He was a founding member of The Funnel film collective (1977–82) in Toronto. He pursued a career as a cinematographer, working with many noted directors, including George Romero, George Hickenlooper, Peter Lynch, and Jonathan Sobol. His photographic work has appeared in Impulse Magazine and Prefix Photo (cover). Recent exhibitions include Somewhere (2020); Placeholders (2019), and Free Assembly, with Christine Davis and Vlad Lunin (2017), at Christie Contemporary. His work is held in numerous private and corporate collections, including Telus Sky and Bank of Montreal.