.Nancy Valladares, film still from Image Metabolisms, 2025. Courtesy of the artist

NANCY VALLADARES | IMAGE METABOLISMS
NOV. 1, 2025 - JAN. 10, 2026

Sometimes referred to as “buried sunshine”, coal contains ancient solar energy in the innumerous leaves and blades of grass that were nurtured by the sun and buried under intense heat and pressure. Coal, as a container of the primordial sun, holds an entire world of cyclical growth, seasons, lifecycles, and decay, much older than that of human time. Photographs, as drawings in light, owe their sensitivity to this ancient life. In Image Metabolisms, Nancy Valladares unearths the networks of extractive fossil economies and the chemical processes of fossilized life that photography hinges upon.

In her first solo exhibition in Canada, Valladares uncovers the interwoven systems of corporate, chemical, and extractive processes that enable visual culture. Each material in Image Metabolisms is a node in the interconnected web between photography and fossil fuels. Asphalt, bitumen, video, sound, solar-powered fountains, and lavender oil form a constellation of matter that visualizes the concealed network of extraction. Witnessing these material and economic relationships is often surprising since, “In Canada, colonial society works hard to obscure and erase the presence of… weaponised ancient fossil kin from the consciousness of settlers….” 

As the Gallery’s 2025 Artist-in-Residence at the Gushul Studio in Blairmore, AB, Valladares researched both the historical and current scale of industrial coal and bitumen extraction in the Crowsnest Pass and across Alberta. While at a museum in the Crowsnest Pass, Valladares encountered a diagram titled “What Mankind Owes to a Lump of Coal” that is partly reproduced in the gallery. Beginning with coal and expanding out in a complex web, the drawing depicts just how intertwined ancient life is in the products and chemical processes of today, composing anything from tar, to cotton dyes, and perfumes.

Coal and bitumen have been tied to image-making from the start. The process termed Heliography (from the Greek helios, meaning “sun”, and graphein, meaning “writing”) by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) was used to create the oldest surviving photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras (c. 1826–27). The Heliograph used Bitumen of Judea, a naturally occurring asphalt, mixed with lavender oil and exposed to sunlight through a camera obscura. The UV light hardens the bitumen mixture onto a metal plate, rendering it insoluble. The first photograph was quite literally inscribed in fossil fuels. Niépce, along with his brother Claude, were already quite familiar with combustion and hydrocarbons. In their work as inventors, they also produced the world’s first internal combustion engine nearly 20 years prior. 

In dialogue with the entangling of photographic history, extraction, and the mythology of fossil fuels, Valladares creates images in a process similar to Niépce’s Heliographs. Small metal plates, coated with bitumen, bare the faint traces of southern Alberta landscapes and the traces left by the coal mining industry. Valladares’ dialogue with the origins of photography brings to light the oft forgotten connections between image-making and the combustion of buried life. In this instance, the camera and the combustion engine are not so different. Both are contained systems, exposing fossil fuels to fire (whether that of the sun or the combustion chamber) to achieve the desired result. Valladares’ photos are membranes of “buried sunshine”. Once dug up, this petrochemical ancient life undergoes a kind of double exposure, formed by the sun in its first life to be reconstituted onto a plate millions of years in the future for the sun to alter its form once again.

Valladares’ particular attention to scent is another way that she alludes to the vast networks of life that enable photography. Piled throughout the room and used to create the bubbling tailings pools, the faint, acrid smell of asphalt is detectable in the air. Asphalt’s sulfurous smell originates from the bitumen within as its volatile organic compounds decompose. Like the asphalt in roads or on roofs, fossilized life surrounds the body as much as it permeates visual culture. Within the constructed tailings pools, trickling water fountains disperse lavender oil, an attractive, floral relief to the odorous asphalt. Mixing lavender oil and bitumen in the air, Valladares de-materializes the organic mixture of Niépce’s original Heliograph into the very atmosphere of the exhibition.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Preparators: Arianna Richardson (Lead Preparator), Rachael Chaisson, D. Hoffos

Nancy Valladares is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and educator currently based in New York. Born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Nancy’s practice is deeply influenced by the construction of Honduran national identity through botanical and agricultural regimes. Trained as a photographer and filmmaker, her practice grapples with the networks and flows of image-making, and their technopolitics: from sensors, to servers, to precious metal extraction and the carbon intensive footprint of the cloud.

Valladares was a resident at Triangle Arts Association and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and received fellowships at Harvard University’s Film Studies Center and the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative at MIT. Nancy’s work has been exhibited and screened at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Sakiya Foundation, Ramallah; Goethe Institute Chicago; Ralph Arnold Gallery, Chicago; and Microscope Gallery in New York. 

Alongside Hsurae, Nancy runs Lythologies.org a decentralized research group interested in climate futures and new ecological imaginaries. Their collaborative practice emerges from pedagogical experiments, cooking sessions, and art workshops held in the high desert and the arctic: sites of geologic and temporal frictions. With the support of cultural organizations in Taiwan and the US they have built a network of collaborators that are deeply invested in telling stories about climate and the environment. Collaborative works and workshops have been exhibited at MIT, Maxxi, RIXC Arts and Science Festival, Fab Cafe Taipei, Parsons (The New School) and Artica Svalbard.

Nancy Valladares was the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin’s Gushul Studio Artist in Residence for 2025. The Gushul Residency is a long-standing program that invites artists from around the world to visit the mountain town of Blairmore, Alberta in preparation for an exhibition at the Gallery.

We acknowledge the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.