Craig Benjamin
Stone Dreams of the Sea
landscape photographs from the coastlines of Mi’kma’ki
The Featured Artist's work can be seen online and in the gallery from November 5 - 30.
All images printed with archival inks. Mats are acid-free and the glass is conservation quality.
All prints are available at other sizes on request.
Opening reception: Friday, November 7, 5-7pm
Artist talk: Wednesday, November 19 at 12 noon.
Contact the gallery for inquiries.
About the Artist
I work as a researcher and writer specializing in human rights. Over the last three decades, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside activists and communities around the world who are fighting to protect the cultural landscapes that sustain them.
Since coming back home to Nova Scotia about seven years ago, I’ve tried to take the time to better appreciate the landscapes in which I live and my relationship to them. Part of this process has been a return to a serious and daily practice of photography.
I was deeply engaged with photography when I was younger, doing some commercial and editorial work and making prints for other photographers. That immersion in film photography and darkroom work still influences how I approach the medium.
Artist Statement
There are rock formations along the coast that preserve the rippled images of ancient waters. Fossilized currents of vanished seas. Stone as 500-million-year-old photographs.
Landscapes reveal themselves in ephemeral moments. Light and shadow change from second to second. Weather shifts and daylight progresses into night.
Some landscapes, however, also reach out to us across more expansive cycles of time, where everything that emerges from the sea is also in the progress of returning.
I love to photograph these landscapes.
Photography is associated with the momentary, preserving fleeting instants to reveal them later in the light of nostalgia. I’m intrigued by the thought that photography can also work in other ways, as potentially reaching back to the landscapes of deep time even as they reach forward to us.
Photography as alchemy, transmuting the sediment of emulsion and ink into a new fossil record.