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Pupil Peer
Solo Exhibition
Curated by Stephen Waddell
CSA Space, Vancouver
Opening January 22 6-9pm until February 19
The eight photographs in Pupil Peer stem from Felix Rapp’s expansive and multifaceted engagement with experimental forms of analogue photography. These seemingly eclectic tableaux and studies reflect distinct contexts of production—day jobs, gigs, residencies, community workshops, and curatorial projects—that have shaped his life and work in recent years.
These contexts notably include the darkroom at the University of British Columbia where the artist worked as a technician. In Darkroom In Use (Violet and Deon at UBC, 2025) he portrays two students who embraced the possibilities of experimental darkroom techniques and who subsequently formed a queer art collective. Their collaboration eventually led to a group exhibition held at People, a small artist-run venue that Rapp co-organizes with other Vancouver-based artists.
Demonstration (UBC, 2024) is a chemigram that he produced on the job during one of his regular darkroom printing demos for groups of students. Emulating the Surrealist technique of frottage, the pattern on the print results from rubbing the paper’s emulsion against the bottom of the darkroom sink.
Following a trip through the Rockies en route to the darkroom at the Banff Centre, where he was an artist in residence in 2022, Rapp made After Wilson Bentley (Banff Centre, 2022) with found negative reproductions of Wilson Bentley’s (1865-1931) encyclopedic image collection of snow-crystal formations. Bentley’s photographs famously showed that no two snowflakes are alike—a foundational and highly allegorical idea, which has become part of our “mental furniture.”
Blue Heron (Movie Set, 2025) was made while the artist worked on set for Sophy Romvari’s eponymous film where the father of a Hungarian family newly arrived in Canada shows his children the magic of the darkroom. In charge of designing a period-accurate darkroom for the movie set, Rapp was also tasked with teaching the basics of black-and-white printing to the young actors.
Enlarger (Malaspina Printmakers Society, 2023) is another photograph that stems from a darkroom that Rapp had to create from scratch. During his long-term residency at Malaspina Printmakers Society he sourced used equipment throughout the Lower Mainland and put together the organization’s first photographic darkroom. This image of an enlarger was one of many included in a collaborative photo-mural that he conceived for the glass façade of Malaspina’s building in downtown Vancouver. On this occasion, Rapp invited numerous artists from the local community to print with him in the makeshift facility and bring their own visual material.
In 2023, Rapp befriended Al Razutis (b. 1946), an artist and educator known for his experimental films but whose practice revolved around the West Coast holography scene of the 1970s. He decided to curate an exhibition of Razutis’ sculptural hologram assemblages, which had rarely been seen since the 1980s. Gravity Wins, Entropy Rules took place at UNIT/PITT in 2024. While working on this project, Rapp met the artist and filmmaker Sidney Gordon. With their collective XINEMA, Gordon developed a film program presented alongside the exhibition. Together, Rapp and Gordon also took several trips to Razutis’ home studio on Saturna Island, where they set up a DIY lab to learn holography under Razutis’ technical mentorship. Holography Training (Sidney on Saturna Island, 2024) was made during one of those trips when the three artists smoked copious amounts of homegrown pot and sat silently in the dark for long stretches of time so as not to disturb the laser exposure.
Pupil Peer also includes an appropriated print. Logistics (Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 1980-2025) is a photogram of a cartoonish face composed of small gear parts; it was made by the artist’s mother when she was a high school student in the industrial German city built around the largest chemical manufacturer in the world.
Finally, in BC Bud Distortion (Industry Standard, 2023), Rapp merges the anachronistic and sensuous pleasure of hand-colouring with commercial photographic techniques learned while assisting on photoshoots for one of Canada’s leading cannabis companies. By law, in Canada, weed advertisements cannot suggest use of the product, thereby excluding hands and people from the picture. This libertarian form of puritanism wryly echoes the disembodied aspects of digital photography where touch happens only with the eyes.
With each picture Rapp consciously plays with the ambiguous autonomy of works that might also be read as documents of experience. In this exhibition, he folds multiple realms into the focused space of his artistic practice. For the artist, who primarily makes a living as a digital photo-retoucher, the darkroom has come to represent a communal space—one where shared knowledge flows through the medium’s “liquid intelligence."
- Emile Rubino
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Solo Exhibition
Curated by Stephen Waddell
CSA Space, Vancouver
Opening January 22 6-9pm until February 19
The eight photographs in Pupil Peer stem from Felix Rapp’s expansive and multifaceted engagement with experimental forms of analogue photography. These seemingly eclectic tableaux and studies reflect distinct contexts of production—day jobs, gigs, residencies, community workshops, and curatorial projects—that have shaped his life and work in recent years.
These contexts notably include the darkroom at the University of British Columbia where the artist worked as a technician. In Darkroom In Use (Violet and Deon at UBC, 2025) he portrays two students who embraced the possibilities of experimental darkroom techniques and who subsequently formed a queer art collective. Their collaboration eventually led to a group exhibition held at People, a small artist-run venue that Rapp co-organizes with other Vancouver-based artists.
Demonstration (UBC, 2024) is a chemigram that he produced on the job during one of his regular darkroom printing demos for groups of students. Emulating the Surrealist technique of frottage, the pattern on the print results from rubbing the paper’s emulsion against the bottom of the darkroom sink.
Following a trip through the Rockies en route to the darkroom at the Banff Centre, where he was an artist in residence in 2022, Rapp made After Wilson Bentley (Banff Centre, 2022) with found negative reproductions of Wilson Bentley’s (1865-1931) encyclopedic image collection of snow-crystal formations. Bentley’s photographs famously showed that no two snowflakes are alike—a foundational and highly allegorical idea, which has become part of our “mental furniture.”
Blue Heron (Movie Set, 2025) was made while the artist worked on set for Sophy Romvari’s eponymous film where the father of a Hungarian family newly arrived in Canada shows his children the magic of the darkroom. In charge of designing a period-accurate darkroom for the movie set, Rapp was also tasked with teaching the basics of black-and-white printing to the young actors.
Enlarger (Malaspina Printmakers Society, 2023) is another photograph that stems from a darkroom that Rapp had to create from scratch. During his long-term residency at Malaspina Printmakers Society he sourced used equipment throughout the Lower Mainland and put together the organization’s first photographic darkroom. This image of an enlarger was one of many included in a collaborative photo-mural that he conceived for the glass façade of Malaspina’s building in downtown Vancouver. On this occasion, Rapp invited numerous artists from the local community to print with him in the makeshift facility and bring their own visual material.
In 2023, Rapp befriended Al Razutis (b. 1946), an artist and educator known for his experimental films but whose practice revolved around the West Coast holography scene of the 1970s. He decided to curate an exhibition of Razutis’ sculptural hologram assemblages, which had rarely been seen since the 1980s. Gravity Wins, Entropy Rules took place at UNIT/PITT in 2024. While working on this project, Rapp met the artist and filmmaker Sidney Gordon. With their collective XINEMA, Gordon developed a film program presented alongside the exhibition. Together, Rapp and Gordon also took several trips to Razutis’ home studio on Saturna Island, where they set up a DIY lab to learn holography under Razutis’ technical mentorship. Holography Training (Sidney on Saturna Island, 2024) was made during one of those trips when the three artists smoked copious amounts of homegrown pot and sat silently in the dark for long stretches of time so as not to disturb the laser exposure.
Pupil Peer also includes an appropriated print. Logistics (Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 1980-2025) is a photogram of a cartoonish face composed of small gear parts; it was made by the artist’s mother when she was a high school student in the industrial German city built around the largest chemical manufacturer in the world.
Finally, in BC Bud Distortion (Industry Standard, 2023), Rapp merges the anachronistic and sensuous pleasure of hand-colouring with commercial photographic techniques learned while assisting on photoshoots for one of Canada’s leading cannabis companies. By law, in Canada, weed advertisements cannot suggest use of the product, thereby excluding hands and people from the picture. This libertarian form of puritanism wryly echoes the disembodied aspects of digital photography where touch happens only with the eyes.
With each picture Rapp consciously plays with the ambiguous autonomy of works that might also be read as documents of experience. In this exhibition, he folds multiple realms into the focused space of his artistic practice. For the artist, who primarily makes a living as a digital photo-retoucher, the darkroom has come to represent a communal space—one where shared knowledge flows through the medium’s “liquid intelligence."
- Emile Rubino
