My practice is centred in two interacting domains: questions of community and the exchanges by which community is structured, and our bodily experience of architectural and social space. My built objects are often domestically useful, made from hardware store kit plans, and enter the world through ‘for sale’ posters, classified ads, raffles, and other straightforward means. My built installations are depictions of sensory experience that require our bodily participation.

Using the early photographic method of cyanotypes, I will make portraits of bodies for the Luminous Bodies Thematic Residency. However, in contesting the supposed objectivity of photography, as well its associated distortion and manipulation of body image, I would produce images that question, problematize and reveal aspects of the body that are negated and undervalued, or that are utterly fantastical. By pushing the limits of a very elemental approach to photography, I want to reawaken people’s senses to the possibilities of who they may be and how they may be seen in the world. Given the ubiquity by which people present themselves to the world using digital photographs through virtual mediums, the goal of the project is to allow people to reconnect with themselves and one another on a more direct, one-to-one basis.

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Alisdair MacRae, an artist working in sculpture and installation, was born in 1974 in Dawson Creek, BC and raised in Victoria. In 2002, he received an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College, New York, complementing his 1998 BFA from the University of Victoria. In 2012, he completed a thesis on Joane Cardinal-Schubert for the graduate program in Art History at Carleton University.