Ne me quitte pas

Now on display at the Arts & Cultural Community at Wanderstill Ode (OACC) is Ne me quitte pas, an exhibition of photography by Canary Beck. Becky was kind enough to invite me to view the images as she prepared the installation, and they're even more striking in the intimate environment in the attic of the OACC exhibition space (there's a teleport at the landing point, or you can take the stairs all the way up), which is curated by Anasyro. Despite Becky's high visibility in the virtual arts community through the Basilique, with productions of Romeo and Juliet, and Paradise Lost, she has never exhibited her own photos.

The images shown here are deeply personal and poignant, and were never intended to be publicly displayed. "In this series of pictures called Ne me quitte pas," she explains, "I have aimed to express what I am only now able to express coherently in words. I’ve even lifted the titles for the pictures from the verses of Jacques Brel's plaintive poetry set to music, feeling unable to write them myself. These very personal pictures are the result of two months of taking hundreds of similar pictures on my bare white platform — most of which I obliterated soon after I took them. I never planned to share them. As I've reviewed these works for showing; however, I see them now like heavy pages in an old diary; a shabby book that reflects a threadbare me, depleted by gravity and, I hope, now hardly recognisable. Things fall apart, but we reflect, re-examine and reconsider the necessary grieving process that we go though, which tends to accompany any significant loss or separation, and perhaps might feel a cathartic lightness in the sharing." The exhibition will remain on view through 10 January 2015.