The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project

British Columbia-based artist Donald Lawrence combined his art-making skills and kayaking passions in this touring exhibition, which featured: a custom river kayak that has been converted into a floating darkroom, large-scale black and white photographs of the sea bed, and a Super-8 film "The Inter-tidal Photographer". The kayak, loaded with homemade pinhole cameras (built with parts collected from trips to nautical and plumbing supply shops), chemicals for developing the photos, and a portable developing tent, looked so burdened by its equipment that we doubted its ability to float. This ambiguous quality, coupled with Lawrence's documentary-style film (reminiscent of films once shown in high school History classes depicting early Canadian explorers) left us questioning whether we were looking at an artefact or a work of fiction.