The series Circa 1978 is a set of giclee print enlargements of SX70 format Polaroids taken around 1978 while Verne Harrison was working on an oil exploration crew in Alberta and includes a few additional images of life in his hometown at that time. Enlarging the images has made it possible to clearly see the effects of time upon the photos. There are visible cracks on the surfaces and dust, scratches, stains and fingerprints are magnified. Polaroid’s ground-breaking technology initiated a throw-away culture wrapped in a temporal ideology which has been flip-flopped here into an archival portrayal of a small group of people in a small area of Alberta, sometime in the late seventies.

Verne Harrison was born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1955. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Western in 1985 after studying Fine Art at Fanshawe College. He continues to live and work in Guelph as the Gallery Coordinator at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre.

Harrison, who uses a wide variety of media, has been exhibiting since 1982. His work is in several public and private collections in Canada and the United States.