Public Art > Bathed in Strange Light (The Bentway)

Natalie Hunter
Bathed In Strange Light
2025
Commissioned by The Bentway
55 Fort York Blvd, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
https://thebentway.ca/event/bathed-in-strange-light/

Part of Contact Photography Festival 2025

https://contactphoto.com/festival/2025/core/natalie-hunter-bathed-in-strange-light
Hamilton-based artist Natalie Hunter’s Bathed in Strange Light is a durational, site-specific installation responding to the architecture of The Bentway Studio and Terrace. The photo-based intervention investigates natural sunlight and its material effects on the body and mind, within our urban centres, in architecture, and in photography.

As we orbit around the sun, the buildings and structures around us shape our experience of sunlight at street level, illuminating new details and perspectives with the changing of seasons. In the CityPlace neighbourhood, marked by numerous high-rises, the light bounces off buildings to create ever-shifting patterns of light and shadow. How can photography offer a reflection on these fleeting moments in our environment, highlighting new ways of experiencing our public spaces?

Bathed in Strange Light explores notions of time and the sun’s impact on urban settings. Climate change and global warming patterns have resulted in the overheating of urban centres, and yet the value of, and need for, shade in public spaces during periods of intense heat and humidity is often overlooked in urban planning.In a process paralleling the sun’s behaviour and ephemerality, Hunter made layered exposures, capturing and combining memories and subtle details found around Canoe Landing Park between the winter of 2024 and spring of 2025. Presented as transparent images affixed to The Bentway Studio’s western windows, the work performs as a slow-moving cinema of light and shadow, activated by the sun to reveal itself in new ways throughout the day. The images throw moving pools of light onto the site, creating latent images across its concrete surfaces. Playing with architecture, photography, and time, Hunter’s images scatter fragmented scenes of local infrastructure, plant life, and the sky, as a continual meditation on the possibilities of the sun’s relationship with the built environment.

The project also explores a critical paradox—as human beings, we require sunlight and fresh air, both to enrich our mental and physical health, and toward our overall well-being. Sunlight, however, is also a powerful destroyer, detrimental to our sensitive eyes and skin. In this way, the sun’s light is both nourishing and volatile. Its rhythms should—and in the best cases, do—govern how we develop urban planning policies, relate to public space, and create spaces within which to thrive.

Bathed in Strange Light acts as a contemplative remedy to the dissonant relationship we have with the sun. Typically working in analogue processes, layering negatives and using backlit film, Hunter incorporates new digital tools here, to expand her photographic practice into the large-scale sculptural field. Part architecture, part image, the project’s translucent window installations morph, alter, and stretch Hunter’s imagery across the grounds, evincing the ways that sunlight affects architecture and the body in real time. This site-specific work hinges upon fluctuating lighting conditions and viewer movement. It demonstrates that while we can’t change the rhythms of the sun, we can collaborate with it in meaningful ways to reimagine public space as a site within which to curate shade for comfort, and sunlight for warmth and nourishment.

Commissioned by The Bentway, in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival.

Natalie Hunter (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist from Hamilton, Ontario. She creates photo-based installations, sculpture, and moving images that explore relationships between embodied experience, spatial perception, the senses, personal memory, and identity. Her work studies the complexities of time, space, memory, and the senses in our digitally saturated culture through an interplay between image, material, and form. With a fascination for both image making and working with materials by hand, her research and studio practice poetically investigates the shifting sensory experiences of light, colour, time, consciousness, and motion as they relate to memory and perception.