Birch Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by gallery artist Nicholas Pye as part of this year’s Scotiabank CONTACT Photography festival. Rise and Fall will be comprised of a selection of fourteen images from a larger a body of photographic work produced in Ireland and France in 2014.

Patience, observation, performance; In Rise and Fall I study and intervene with light, architecture, and lens.  Through occupying these spaces, my intention was to create still photographs rooted in duration.  These works manifest themselves through both the performativity of light and the performativity of the figure - each treated as equal subjects.  The selection process for the environments photographed was done after spending much time in each physical space, watching and experiencing distinctive change to the quality of light at various periods of the day and night.  Within these considered spaces, performances where enacted as a response with the intention to echo the type of affect and physical charge each space conjured.  By embodying these spaces for the lens, I create works that reflect the psychological nature between presence and absence. This is realized through the representation of what the light reveals in the frame, what darkness obscures, and by how much the figure wittingly divulges for us.   - Nicholas Pye