Series Title: Angels of History
The series Angels of History visually responds to childhood memories and fantasies from my youth, gazing through images and films of German performer Marlene Dietrich. Reviewing a life lived in glamour and luxury, with a common life removed from such trimmings; these works create new fantasies linked by time, color and memory. The writing of Walter Benjamin’s visions of history and the work of Paul Klee "Angelus Novus" has informed the creation of this series. I begin the work by selecting black and white images of film stills or magazines chosen because of:†location (i.e. a train speeding through China, "Shanghai Express"), time (a WWII USO tour, "Somewhere in North Africa"),†pose (straddling a chair on a cabaret stage facing an audience in Weimar Germany, "Four Blue Angels"). I then introduce color from my memory palette, the watercolor palette of Paul Klee with readymade colors and titles such as Persian Blue sampled from the Internet. The images are then manipulated using erasure, duplication, and blurring in a manner similar to the workings of memory. Often speculating on time and location of borrowed images, these old pictures are opened to a sensation of timelessness. By producing stillness from movement, time is slowed to divulge a new reality.† A reality where one might review memories, progress, futures and lives lived through reflection and artistic consideration. |
