By Nasha Dutta

Photography alumna Molly Steels’ series I am/was/always is now on display at The Image Centre.

The series features photographs of her female relatives taken from her family’s archive, collages and Steels’ own original photography.

“For me, this series started because I was thinking a lot about existentialism and the idea of all of us, inevitably, dying one day… [but] I was trying to think about approaching it with curiosity instead of dread,” said Steels in an interview with The Eyeopener.

Through using natural materials and motifs, Steels pays homage to the shared lived experience and kinship spanning across generations in her family. For her, the medium of photography can feel like a form of time travel: a reassurance that because someone once existed, their presence remains anchored in time forever.
“When I look through my family archives, I do feel this sense of comfort looking at their entire life and seeing it from a far off perspective,” she said.

The series features a black and white portrait of Steels’ grandmother, Pauline Breen, or ‘Grandma Polly,’ as she calls her. The portrait is overlaid with pressed flowers collected by Steels on the day of Polly’s funeral–a ceremony Steels attended remotely via Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The photograph itself is from Grandma Polly’s archive, passed down to Steels’ mother. The image references Steels’ intergenerational relationships within her family, working under overarching themes of transcendence and mortality.

“Thinking of these different people that I hold so closely, but putting them all in the series and thinking of them as these people that I’m connected to in the grand scheme of time…just felt kind of special to me,” she said.

Interspersed among the archival series are original self-portraits and conceptual still-lifes created in response to the old family photographs. One striking piece features a vintage, short-legged wooden chair, originally modified by Steels’ great-grandfather to sit sturdily on a lake dock.

The chair holds a strangely shaped piece of found timber by the water’s edge that caught Steels’ eye during her creative process. Pairing generations-old functional heirlooms with raw forest remnants in her photography allows Steels to converse with her relatives.

“Photography has given us a tool to communicate across generations and across locations,” said Steels. “You get this photo evidence of somebody that you loved that you can look back on whenever you want in this moment frozen in time.”

The series’ title draws from an essay by philosopher Diana Prokofyeva, titled “Death and the Experience of Photography an Existential Consideration.” Steels writes on her exhibition website that the essay paints the photograph as “a phenomenon that exists between two worlds—the living and the dead—a way to avoid death by copying a moment and suspending it within time.”

Steels resonates with Prokofyeva’s idea, that photography is a way to say, “I am and was and always shall have been.”

Several photographs in the series feature a lake by Steels’ family cottage in Gooderham, Ont., near where her great aunt Sylvia once lived. Steels says she feels a connection forged across time by swimming in the same body of water as her.

“When you’re floating in water, it places you into different places at once. You’re above, you’re below, you’re in between,” said Steels. “Time and existence is something that we’re floating in between.”

The exhibit at The Image Centre also features a video produced by Steels, based on a letter written by a fortune teller to Steels’ great aunt Sylvia. In the video, Steels laid excerpts from the letter over footage of herself standing in the lake.
“Through this strange letter, I’m kind of thinking about how she would have felt reading it and like the wonder of what her life has in store,” said Steels.

She first started work on the series in 2023, following Steels’ graduation from Toronto Metropolitan University. The total process, which spanned over three years, was not without its challenges.

Without built-in faculty guidance, Steels was creating a photography project in circumstances she hadn’t experienced before.

During a residency at Gallery 44 in Toronto, Steels was given space to explore the collage element of her series under professional guidance, accelerating the series’ completion.

“It was a six-month residency that led to a solo show in their members’ gallery,” said Steels. “That was a really great way to put a deadline on it and speed up my process.”

Throughout I am/was/always, there is the repeated motif of natural materials, from photographed snake skin to collaged birch bark. Steels said this came from a desire to create a sense of ephemerality in the series.

She said she hopes to convey the relationship between location and time by connecting the degradation of natural materials to the temporary nature of human life. Similar to human life, Steels said she is curious about the idea that her work will be something that degrades naturally over time.

“I’m standing in one place looking back at all these people who’ve lived in the same world as me,” said Steels. “Thinking of the world as this shared backdrop and us as these people that just come in temporarily and experience it and then pass it on to the next.”

I am/was/always runs at The Image Centre until Dec. 5.