Adam Swica’s photographs under the series title Ellipsis probe the durability of the photographic gesture, or capture, in the making of a photographic object. Through the mechanisms of multiple and time exposures, Swica uses light, movement, and duration to coax dimensional planes within the photographic frame.

Shooting on film, Swica physically shifts sheets of coloured construction paper and inscribes the repeated movements onto a single negative. Variations in opacity and translucency are determined by the durational light of a long exposure. Each photograph contains anywhere from 20 to more than a 100 gestures, with successive captures potentially infringing or obliterating preceding ones. Swica’s methodology involves memory at the level of cataloguing the sequence of shots, and chance at the level of comingled photographic events. The in-camera building of the image is an active yet unpredictable construction, situated somewhere between an automatic drawing and an architectonic structure.

With the unfolding of motion compressed into one frame, repeatedly recorded elements emerge as complex geometries. Their trajectory is reconfigured as an ethereal, contiguous whole, a volume sculpted by light through time.