I have an admission to make: I am a procrastinator. Immediately following the May 2009 Contact Toronto Photography Festival I had intended to write a review about Sara Angelucci’s exhibition Regular 8. Well here it is. I deeply apologize to the artist for my shortcomings.
For the past ten years Angelucci has been investigating the relationship between still and moving images. Angelucci is after all a photography and video artist. She also harbors a love and fascination for home movies and family snapshots. In viewing Angelucci’s body of work one might think she lives far too much in the past; instead she reflects on and reconstructs the past in her current work, knowing fully that the past is fleeting and memory is at best a composition of the mundane and the extraordinary.
Digby Neck, Chromogenic Print, 29.5" x 85 3/4", 2000
The constancy in Angelucci’s body of work is remarkable and bears mentioning. The fact that she is always changing from still image making to moving images is very significant to the Regular 8 series. In Angelucci’s early work she created photographs as if they were fragments of moving images. Sometimes she used cheap toy cameras that did not advance well from frame to frame (Digby Neck) or she used a professional camera, then carefully overlapped negatives in the printing process (She Crossed the Sea #1).
She Crossed the Sea #1 , Chromogenic print 25.5" x 54.5"
Work prior to Regular 8 relied on Angelucci’s family photographs and home movies to explore the fragility of memory, the loss one feels, and the inability to capture the essence of the past. One of the projects that I like is Stillness. Angelucci states that “…[in] Making use of vintage family photographs, Stillness turns to them as sources of evidence, seeking clues in tiny isolated fragments of glances, hand gestures, clothing details, etc. These black and white fragments are paired with details of landscape images recently taken on visits to the rural landscape surrounding my ancestral village. The still within the still—to which Stillness refers evokes not only a sense of searching for clues and evidence, but also the mystery, which descends upon these images with the passing of time.
#4 Stillness (magnolia #2), Chromogenic print, 30" x 40"
In Stillness, a fleeting glance, frozen gesture or landscape detail, evokes the desire to connect with lost persons, a particular locality, and a broken lineage.“
It is clear in Angelucci’s work that in delving into the past, we become less sure of our own memories. Despite our looking at family snapshots we can’t fully connect with the person in the picture; instead we are left with an irrefutable longing.
Using vintage Super 8 home movies as a starting point Angelucci also examines the relationships of time, family, and memory in several videos that she completed in 2000 and 2003. Unfortunately I can’t show them here but they can be seen on Angelucci’s website. Drawing images from home movies and combining with new video footage In a Hundred “is framed by a child counting to one-hundred who becomes the keeper of time, the metronome reminding us of its relentless march forward… The visual imagery weaves a pattern of time travel which moves inevitably forward but one which carries the past with it. Underlying this obsession with time is an examination of the family via three generations of women; the child counting as the youngest, the video maker as the middle and the video maker's memory (via the Super 8 footage), the past.”
Regular 8 (Dog), Chromogenic print, 40 x 42 inches, 2009
Angelucci also produced the video Snow, a catalyst for the Regular 8 series. Snow “is comprised of a series of film segments taken from the last few seconds of a variety of Super 8 family films. The short scenes in Snow were selected because they still contained the "white dots" which suddenly appear, float over and obliterate the scene. (These dots are literally holes in the film created by Kodak as an identifying tagging system). Although there is nothing remarkable in these ordinary scenes of family life, the video becomes a series of endings strung together forever suspending the narrative. The dots obliterate the last clues of the story; each scene viewed in brief isolation, a small gesture of loss.” In Snow we find film fragments of actual people; in Regular 8 people are actors. In staging scenes of family occasions Angelucci is making an extraordinary departure from her earlier projects.
Regular 8 (Cocktails), Chromogenic print, 40 x 42 inches, 2009
In Regular 8, Angelucci’s carefully arranged and stunningly staged colour photographs --resembling snippets of 8mm films-- portray middle-class family occasions and outings from the 1950s era: idealized, yet plausible scenes of a family touring Niagara Falls, an outdoor wedding party, a baptism, three people drinking cocktails, a family skating on a pond. In the post WWII era, almost everyone was upwardly mobile. This was the era of the automobile, the onset of highways and the beginning of that dreaded blight, suburbia, now problems to today’s urban centres and the cause of massive pollution.
Standard 8 mm also referred to as Regular 8mm was introduced by Kodak during the Great Depression. Few could afford the camera and film to make home movies. By the end of WWII though, those who could afford to buy fancy automobiles and new houses, could also easily afford a Regular 8 camera to preserve family gatherings and engagements. (Home movie making became even more popular and affordably accessible to a larger audience when Super 8mm was introduced in 1965.)
Regular 8 (Niagara Falls), Chromogenic print, 40 x 42 inches, 2009
Regular 8 photographs are comprised of elements or clues that suggest the whole: people are clothed in 1950s costumes; scenes are located in places that do not hint at anything contemporary (a 1950’s apartment building in Fountain, a park adjacent to an old church in Pigeons, a 1920s-30s style room suggesting a lounge in Cocktails) ; photographs are meant to look like regular 8mm film segments; white dots that represent the last few seconds of a film; and that the white dots are not mechanized but selectively placed by Angelucci in a post-shooting digital manipulation.
Regular 8 (Fountain), Chromogenic print, 40 x 42 inches, 2009
Photographs are either shown with three frames and a full image in the mid-section or four frames and two full images in the mid-section. The photographs are clear and polished; it is not necessary that they look scratchy like a real film for that would simply be a copy of a film segment rather than an art photograph. Each photograph is the last vestige of an occasion or outing, the white puncture-like dots signaling the end of a home movie. Angelucci is not interested in frames untainted by punch holes for that would mean that there was more narrative to come. Instead “The white dots… seemed abrupt, incomplete and merciless. Home movies represent the memories of us at our best, happiest, most polished and special. They evoke something we wanted to hold close forever. Of course we never can, and that immanent ending brings to light the painful beauty of the ephemeral nature of our lives.”
Regular 8 (Skaters), Chromogenic print, 40 x 42 inches, 2009
Are the dots too literal? Yes and no. Should the images be without white dots, it would still be obvious that as stills rather than blow-ups of actual films that they are already ruptures in the narratives. The white dots signal the end of a film; will viewers understand what the white dots represent, especially without a didactic panel or artist statement accompanying the images hung in a gallery? Whether the dots are there or not viewers can only surmise what is in front of them. On the other hand the dots mar the image of a perfectly staged scene. One cannot look at the scenes without being somewhat annoyed by the dots floating in the image. In this way the artist clearly suggests that within the polished images lies a certain superficial reality of families in the 1950’s.
Regular 8 (Wedding), Chromogenic print, 40 x 42 inches, 2009
Despite my admiration and liking of Regular 8 I am disappointed that the artist was not more aggressive with the placement of dots. Other than Niagara Falls in which, the young child and woman on the right is half obliterated by the dots, the others have dots that selectively avoid people. The Kodak punch-hole tagging system is mechanized. It easily erases someone’s head or someone blowing out the candles on their birthday cake, whereas Angelucci seemed unable to let go of the sacredness of a staged scene. In Skating the dots encircle the pond, leaving the scene of people skating almost unscathed and in Wedding two dots float above two women’s heads. If we compare it to the video Snow in which actual films are spliced together and freeze some of these frames dots in some instances obliterate heads and other major parts of an event (example, baptism). This is far more plausible. Angelucci has, in creating perfectly rendered scenes been far too cautious.
Regular 8 (Baptism), Chromogenic print, 40 x 42 inches, 2009
That being said Regular 8 is one of the best exhibitions that I have seen in a long time. Angelucci is one of those rare artists that has an excellent portfolio of work throughout her career. I strongly suggest that readers spend some time viewing her work online at www.sara-angelucci.ca or click on the link in the right column.
Sara Angelucci is represented by Wynick/Tuck Gallery. The exhibition took place from May 9 - 30 during the Contact Toronto Photography Festival.
