Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Polaris

June 30 – August 18, 2024

Opening Sunday, June 30, 5-7pm

From June 30 through August 18, PARTICIPANT INC presents Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Polaris, a solo exhibition of gelatin silver prints from Helmar’s ongoing series, Polaris (2015-present). 

“These photographs explore the dramatic potential and complexity of returning home: characters, archetypes, and landscapes of 50 miles on a road to nowhere. As a child in a working-class family growing up on a twenty-six-foot hand troller, my parents taught me where the north star was in the night sky. This constellation alluded to in literature, myth, and song has guided seafaring people for time immemorial. These photographs were made in my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. One of the few capital cities in the United States without a road to the outside world.”

The exhibition brackets a fragment of this larger series of portraits and landscapes with a focus on a two-year span of time between 2020 and 2023 during which Helmar assigned themself the project of self-portraiture, uncommon for the artist, during a time of isolation and extended periods of darkness. In these photographs, Helmar places themself, often accompanied by their dog, Dolly Girl, into scenarios, unbidden, within otherwise vacant landscapes. The majority of these photographs were made with the “unapologetically photographic” Graflex, a view camera from the 1950s, and utilize medium- and large-format film, interchangeable formats with the same aspect ratio (6x7 and 4x5). The large-scale black-and-white gelatin silver prints utilize the formal restraints of photography, its ‘event-ness,’ to depict solitary encounters and landscapes.