The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts. Gallery 1C03, Winnipeg, Manitoba, September 7 – November 10, 2023; University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Winnipeg, Manitoba, September 21, 2023 – April 21, 2024; School of Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba, September 21 – November 10, 2023. Curated by Dr. Serena Keshavjee

The University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba jointly kicked off the spooky season this past fall with the launch of an expertly curated exhibition featuring artistic impressions of séance photography uniquely displayed alongside the archival material that served as its inspiration. The Hamilton Family Fonds at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections is widely recognized as one of the premier archival collections of psychic research in the world. The records document the experiments of Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and Lillian Hamilton, who applied the scientific method to their studies on the existence of life after death – specifically whether “personalities could survive corporeal death and, given the right circumstances, communicate with our world.” The photographs in the fonds purportedly document psychic phenomena, séance participants in deep trance states, and the existence of ectoplasm, which the Hamiltons believed to be the foundational element of life – a mouldable substance like potter’s clay that could bridge the physical and spiritual worlds and facilitate communication between the two. Ectoplasm can be seen emanating from the orifices of mediums or floating above them, often taking shape in the form of faces, gloved hands, or words – photographic evidence of spirits communicating with the living. The Hamilton Family photograph collection is one of the most widely used and referenced research collections at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections. Brian Hübner, in his doctoral dissertation, traces the ways in which the Hamilton photos have been used in film, popular print-based works, scholarly works, and art. He claims that scholars or artists reusing these records in the creation of new works communicate their own meanings upon them, often “moving outside accepted uses and meta-narratives.” He goes on to argue that each reuse of the material adds a new, inextricable layer of meaning to the original records that will persist and must be reckoned with by all future users. The latest person to engage in meaning-making with the Hamilton Family photographs is University of Winnipeg history of art professor Dr. Serena Keshavjee. Keshavjee is the curator of an ambitious multi-site, multi-format art exhibition featuring and inspired by the Hamilton Family Fonds titled The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts. The exhibition comprises archival records displayed alongside contemporary responses to the records, from a series of artists, in three separate venues. This collection of artists and their work, curated by Keshavjee, adds further meaning to the original photographs through artistic commentaries. Keshavjee’s enthusiasm for the project and the source material is evident and infectious. The exhibition is brimming with energy (psychic or not). At the Gallery 1C03 venue, Keshavjee centres photographs of ectoplasmic manifestations from Hamilton medium Mary Marshall in vitrines and adorns the gallery walls surrounding them with multi-media art installations. The artists attempt to recreate ectoplasmic materializations using various formats while adding contemporary commentary to their work. Estelle Chaigne creates stereoscopic prints of a recreated séance on glass, while Grace A. Williams recreates a similar scene in her video installation. Shannon Taggart purports to commit the actual conjuring of ectoplasm to film for the first time. Ectoplasm is recreated in beautiful textile forms such as crocheted doilies, woollen felt jewellery, and glow-in-the-dark beaded gloves by Angela DeFreitas, Tricia Wasney, and Teresa Burrows, respectively. DeFreitas’s grandchild Erika DeFreitas engages further with her grandmother’s creations in a series of photographs in which she mimics Mary Marshall’s expression of ectoplasm by simulating this with doilies that emerge from her mouth, eyes, and ears (apparently without ever seeing the Marshall photographs for reference – spooky!). Keshavjee notes in a didactic panel that, by …