Trace Heavens by James Nizam, is an installation that plays with light in its natural form, through manipulation of the building it exists through. Primarily, his work is based on manipulating the form of homes and buildings slated for demolition with the intention to repurpose their inevitable future, through capturing a moment. The resulting works are photographic. Trace Heavens was originally composed in 2011, and exhibited in Vancouver in 2012.

Nizam, originally from England, now living in Canada, is represented in galleries across Canada and Switzerland. His work is a combined portfolio of his own solo work, and collaborations with other artists, across these geographical platforms. His work can be found in a number of private collections across the United States, Europe and Canada also.

Trace Heavens, as well as Nizam’s other work, centres around the idea of the rooms becoming backdrops for the discarded contents and architectural debris that he accumulated and constructed into sculptures of elegant complexity. The emphasis on re-inventing and giving meaning to an otherwise discarded object, through manipulation of its form, is at the heart of this inquiry of Nizam’s understanding of the photograph as a trace; a documentary image that comes to act as a ruin or a relic, a fragment or a memory by virtue of its engagement with an altered, and absent site.

Nizam’s work is a play on architecture, its devalue as debris and a reinvention through an aesthetic, caught on film. I appreciate this repurpose and the resulting trace/image; the giving of a life to something destined for departure is quite beautiful.