23 November-21 December 2000
Untitled (Chain)
Gazzola’s project focuses on the socially constructed body and the inherent contradictions of these social constructs. The work deconstructs the historical and religious projections of the sacred and profane imposed on the body. It also concerns the dual nature of attitude that exists about the body, in that it can be regarded as both sacred and profane, pornographic and unspeakable.
19 May-16 June 2000
Landscape with Thumb, photograph, 20″x 24″, 1997
Photographs 1997-1998
The photographs in this body of work make use of family negatives I inherited in 1992 and began printing 1997. What drew my attention to these images were the traces of photographic malfunctions I found and the way these in turn disrupted photography’s signifiers of absorption and illusionism.
The portraits reproduced here were taken in domestic settings during the seventies and have all been affected by a shutter/ flash problems which gives them the character of montage, though they have not, in fact, been manipulated. The prints were made directly from the original negatives, but because of one half of the frame is severely underexposed, one must examine the prints carefully to discover the spatial continuity uniting the image. The unintentional aesthetic of the accident reveals an entirely subjective connection to a modernist avant garde tradition while also making tangible the juncture of the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent.
These photographs bring us back to the very moment of interaction between observer and observed: the result is an evocative combination of serendipity, irony and loss.
12 February-10 March 2000
Driving home one night, I noticed an animal writhing in agony by the side of the road. I impulsively looked into the rearview mirror ti reassure myself. In the dark back seat, my sleeping son’s faint outline and the sound of his steady breathing eased my sense of foreboding. But the image of the wounded animal haunted me. The next morning, I re-traced my route to where I had seen it. Beside the road a large bag of refuse lay carelessly discarded. A gust of wind lifted the dark plastic and it fluttered and writhed.
My exhibition, titled “Vanishing Point”, is an exploration of the theme of separation anxiety, encompassing both physical and emotional separation. Rather than pictorialize it in a literal sense. I chose to investigate alternate forms in which to represent such experiences. Relationships such as those between form and content, experience and behaviour, or collage and montage, combining a seamless surface with the physicality of an interactive condition?
Each of the photographs in the installation is printed on a large piece of transparent film and suspended in space. The ephemeral quality of the lighting, the obvious fragility of the materials, suggest that the viewer’s relationship to both subject and object is transient. The transparency of the film hints at an elusive presence that is as unstable and impermanent as photographic materials themselves are thought to be. The images are hung closely enough together that the viewer’s movement creates air currents that make them move. They ripple and flutter, like the garbage bag by the side of the road. They respond to the subtlest of disturbances, like emotional indexes.They overlap, partially obscuring but also partially revealing what lies behind and beyond. These prints have to be physically negotiated for an unencumbered view, in the anxious search for an illusory answer, a denied resolution.
This exhibition was prompted by my own experience of the intense bond that is the mother/child matrix, of the emotions of love and loss that accompany that bond. The images are intended to be read, in Roland Barthes’ words, “not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.” ( Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida p 21) The purpose was the externalization of my own emotional state in a form that was distanced enough to be understood, that might exorcise the anxiety of separation. Drawing on a shared vernacular, I suspend images of ordinary moments where they will solicit the interaction and emotions of the audience. An image of a forest or a shadow on the floor can provoke anxiety. What lies lifeless by the side of the road also has potential to prick and to wound.
8 January-4 February 2000
These photographs work on several levels. On one level, they document the nocturnal activities of bookworms, those tiny, shy creatures that live in books, read the stories and develop ways to help the characters in the stories. The bookworms discuss the best way to help a character in trouble and then construct whatever is necessary to affect that rescue. These photographs document the additions the bookworms have made to the pages of the book; the gates, docks, tunnels etc. that they have built and added to help whoever they can.
On another level, these photographs represent an attempt to reconfigure my childhood; to exert control over a chaotic world and to make things come out the way I wanted them to. They suggest the idea of a rescuer who sees potential tragedy and then intervenes to give all stories a happy ending.
The photographs also bring to mind ideas of appropriation and alteration of images. By physically adding items and constructions to the existing artwork, the meaning and intent of the images is transformed, sometimes radically.