TEMPORAL SPACE
Alison Rossiter, photography and Catherine Burgess, sculpture in TEMPORAL
On Wednesday, February 11, 2026 I visited the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton with my friend Anne Green to see Temporal, the two person show of my friends Alison Rossiter, who lives in New Jersey and Catherine Burgess, who lives in Edmonton. I missed the opening of this show in September because I had just received a new hip and was reluctant to travel so soon after surgery.
The show was curated by Catherine Crowston and Lindsay Sherman. The overview on the gallery wall does a better job than I could of introducing the work.
Burgess creates form from absence and Rossiter’s photographs materialize the passage of great swaths of time; Rossiter creates images of time while Burgess gives form to illusion.
Catherine works in metal, the least ephemeral of materials. Alison’s work is pure serendipity. She buys unexposed and expired photographic paper then develops the unexposed sheets of paper. The results bear sometimes nondescript, sometimes startling evidence of changes the paper has undergone in its long wait to be exposed to light. She collages shapes, sometimes manipulates the developer to create suggestive abstract images. Then she frames them, sometimes in groups and series. In this show there are two series in which she correlates world events of the same period as the paper. There is a World War 2 Series and Rise and Fall of the Bauhaus series.
Not only time but space were elusive in both bodies of work. Some of Alison’s pieces seem three dimensional and some of Catherines rectangles promise a fourth side if you could just see through the glow of light …. Some of Alison’s work suggests narrative within the image itself. The dialogue between sculpture and photographs is remarkable.
In the 1970’s Alison and I studied photography together at the Banff Centre Visual Communications program for a year; Alison was my first assistant with the Byron Harmon film restoration project. She helped me build my first darkroom and operated the film processor at Ryerson Polytechnic, now Ryerson University which created duplicate negatives of thousands of black-and-white negatives made by my grandfather, Byron Harmon. Before that Anne and I were at University of Alberta together in the BFA Theatre program, the first program of its kind in Canada. Catherine, Alison and I have hiked together in the mountains in a long running women’s hiking group called Skoki Broads.
After missing the opening it felt imperative that I see this show and I am so glad I did.
The following is unrelated to the show but seemed so mysterious and serendipitous to Anne and I that I decided to write about it.
There was a school tour in the gallery and they were standing on what Anne thought was a piece in text on the floor. Big block letters, very hard to make out, inscribed in the concrete. The words we could read fitted perfectly with the theme of Temporal. We spent some time trying to make out the words and could only get intriguing sections of lines. Eventually I said to Anne, I think this must be left from another show, they wouldn’t have done such a poor job of inscribing the words if it was for this show. Anne asked a gallery attendant and, sure enough…
The quote is from the preface to Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man which I read in first year university. An excerpt was published in the British journal, Horizon in 1947. When published in the States, in 1952, it was an instant success and yet it was the only work of his published in his lifetime. It was his first novel….
A guide told us that most people don’t notice the words on the floor but some do and that every subsequent show in that Gallery has resonated with the quotation which begins, I am an invisible man…
These lines were in front Alison’s WW2 series: events leading up to and following Pearl Harbour.
I thought about how time erases the past, leaving incomplete impressions of what has gone before, like Catherine’s rectangles. I thought about unknown soldiers who are dying, even today, in foreign countries unseen and unknown by us.
I also thought of the invisible connections we have with each other, through time, across borders, sometimes invisible, almost forgotten until renewed once more by shared experience. Even when we don’t meet in person.
My hip is a champion. You would have loved this show.
Thanks so much. It was an eerie experience but moving.