Nightcrawlers

After dusk, artificial city lights pollute the very rhythms that make us creatures of this earth. Orange- and blue- toned streetlights built for surveillance bleed rays into our domestic spaces, obscuring our perception of time. The night, and the reprieve from productivity it offers, is held hostage as fluorescence stands in for sunlight. 

 

Before artificial illumination flooded the streets in the late 19th century, the night was thick with darkness that inviolably marked the end of day. After-dusk wanderers were at risk of plummeting off of unseen cliffs or stumbling into treacherous areas. When vision is responsible for 80% of how sighted humans perceive the world around them, the darkness of night has always had consequences. But even as light pollution increasingly encroaches, disrupting migratory birds, pollinating insects, and other nocturnal animals, there are still dark places that exist, and creatures that inhabit them.

 

Nightcrawlers features the work of four contemporary artists—Sara Angelucci (Toronto, ON), Deepti Asthana (Goa, India), Pia-Paulina Guilmoth (Central Maine, United States), and Bill Jackson (Suffolk, England)—who encounter and engage with nature at night, capturing their discoveries using varying lens-based methods. All four are motivated to practice at night for different reasons: they consider the night as a protective time/space, they are influenced by their social position, they are interested in the ecological dimension of the night, or they are drawn to it following loss. Documenting their encounters through photography, scanning, and infrared sensing, they facilitate an imprint of the affective dimension or ‘aura’ of the night. Nightcrawlers is an ode to a disappearing nightscape. An ode to the tensions present in night—fear, alongside curiosity; the human and the more-than-human; life before; and life after.

 

Following her sister’s premature death in 2015 and wanting to dedicate a body of work to her, Sara Angelucci found herself called to the garden; through working in quiet darkness and encountering various plant species, buzzing insects, and nocturnal creatures, she finally felt her grief shift.

 

Growing up in India, Deepti Asthana understood that the period between dusk and dawn was dangerous for women. Asthana’s project The sweet kiss of monsoon night, documents her discoveries while exploring the night despite the potential threats to her safety.

 

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s relationship to the night has shifted since her gender transition within a right-wing county in rural Maine. Before, the night was a dark aesthetic backdrop for photographic compositions, and now, it is a safe-haven of queer illegibility.

 

Deeply concerned by the British government’s recent plans for deforesting large areas of Suffolk’s ancient woodland, Bill Jackson’s meditative, infrared video work endeavors to draw out the affective, sensorial, and otherworldly dimension of the natural landscape at night.

 

Nightcrawlers is an ode to a disappearing nightscape. An ode to the tensions present in night—fear, alongside curiosity; the human and the more-than-human; life before, and life after.

 

BIOS:

 

Sara Angelucci is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, video, audio, and installation. Over the years her projects have drawn from a range of personal photographs and films—to anonymous and found images. Based in the history of photography – from vernacular snapshots to professional studio portraiture—the history outside the image frame informs the direction of her research into natural and social histories implicated in the photograph. Since 2013 her projects have focused on our fraught relationship with the natural world, channeling personal and environmental grief. Sara Angelucci completed her BA at the University of Guelph and her MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is an Adjunct Professor in Photography at the School of Image Arts Toronto Metropolitan University and is represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto.

 

Deepti Asthana is a versatile artist who excels as an independent photographer, filmmaker, educator, and National Geographic Explorer. Her work primarily addresses gender and environmental issues within traditional Indian societies, reflecting her experiences growing up in a patriarchal small town in Northern India. Leaving her IT career behind, she pursued her passion for photography, further honing her skills with a diploma from the Danish School of Media and Journalism, Denmark. In 2020, her talent was recognised by World Press Photo when she was awarded under their prestigious Global Talent 6*6 program.

 

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth lives and makes art in rural central Maine. Pia is a working-class transgender woman who lives with her girlfriend and two cats. Pia’s work is foremost about harnessing beauty as a form of resistance to a world full of terrors. Pia released her third book in November 2024 with Stanley/Barker titled Flowers Drink the River. In 2024-2025 she had two major solo exhibitions with Webber Gallery (London) and CLAMP (New York). In 2024 she won a Google/Aperture Creator Labs grant, and a Peter Reed Foundation grant in photography. In 2022 she was a MacDowell Fellow in Visual Arts. From 2018 to 2021 she was the winner of the Fujifilm Young Talent Award, a Mass Cultural Council fellow in photography, and a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize.

 

Bill Jackson graduated from Coventry School of Art and Birmingham Institute of Art in the UK. He has worked as a stills photographer in television and theatre and spent 28 years lecturing and running programmes in film, photography and electronic media in several art schools. His art practice spans over 45 years and has been exhibited widely including the USA, Argentina, Italy and Japan. His work has received over 50 international awards. He currently lives and works in coastal Suffolk and recently has been collaborating with musicians including the estate of Nick Drake, for the album The Endless Coloured Ways.

 

Andrea Valentine-Lewis (b. 1991, London, ON, Canada) is a curator and writer based on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh people, also known as Vancouver. Her recent curatorial work explores the confluence of ecology, affect, and lens-based practices. She received an MA in Art History from McGill University and a BA in Art, Performance and Cinema Studies from Simon Fraser University. Valentine-Lewis works as a Curatorial Assistant at Vancouver Art Gallery. She was the 2022 recipient of the Emerging Alumni Award from SFU’s Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, and was recently named the 2025/26 Curatorial Fellow at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art