For the Tsimshian [people], the primal mediating force between the non-material and the concrete was represented by the figure of the Raven…The raven was seen either on the beach, in the liminal space between land and sea, or in the sky, aloft or perched on a branch, between earth and heaven. The spirit behind the raven was associated with these transitory aspects of the universe.
Allan Jensen, A Structural Approach to the Tsimshian Raven Myths: Levi-Strauss on the Beach
In myth, ravens are mediators between life and death, often depicted as trickster spirits who disrupted eternal stillness in order to bring forth the material world. Giovanni Jance’s untitled installation at FOYER-LA moves within this same space of transformation, tracing the slow emergence of form from formlessness. Nineteen photographs, drawn from a singular body of work made between 1999 and the present, trace a slow descent from light into an obscure twilight of suspended time.
The sequence begins with lighter skies and thin wisps of cirrocumulus, or plush, ambling cumulus clouds, which shift in form over time, but not in their essential qualities. In the final images, crows appear against blackened skies, barely distinguishable from the void that surrounds them. Taken together, the works create a durational experience, one that does narrate a fall or resolution but instead lingers in a state of suspension, a moment between breaths where visibility falters and our ascribed meanings loosen their hold.
Across many years of irrevocable technological change, Jance’s persistent use of digital cameras quietly enacts another form of postponement: a world caught between the promise of preservation and the inevitable decay of both substrate and subject. His practice embraces the human impulse to fix spirit into matter and wrest a presence from ephemerality.
The crows depicted, much like the mythic Raven, actively occupy interstitial zones between life and its abeyance. Their appearance situates them as witnesses to the ongoing flux that defines experience.
Rather than sealing off the living from the dead, Jance’s work proposes atmospheric conditions where communication between realms remains technically possible, establishing a continuum of breath and spirit across thresholds. Viewers are able to conjure death, not as an absolute severance, but as an oblique continuation of life alongside the material world.
Since the nineteenth century, practitioners of parapsychology have tried to materialize the immaterial through the photographic medium. In this installation, capturing the ineffable through technological processes is a subtle act, but no less resonant. While Jance’s photographs do not depict a singular afterlife with any metaphysical certainty, they offer a terrain where the seen and unseen can converge, where clouds and crows mark the slow drift between form and spirit.
