| Marking an important development in artist Anna Gaskell’s work, the recent exhibition, “Paint Your Own Pictures” at Yvon Lambert New York, consisted solely of films. The exhibition installation, designed in collaboration with architects EMA Designs, featured three new films, all completed in 2006 and 2007, titled Acting Lessons, Vermilion (That’s All I Remember) and Mirror. As an important aspect of her art-making practice for over a decade, artist Anna Gaskell’s films elaborate on the narratives and themes that inform her photographs. In this selection of new films, Gaskell continues to find inspiration from conjuring up stories about stories, examined through the phenomena of memory. |  |
Paint Your Own Pictures
Marking an important development in artist Anna Gaskell’s work, the recent exhibition, “Paint Your Own Pictures” at Yvon Lambert New York, consisted solely of films. The exhibition installation, designed in collaboration with architects EMA Designs, featured three new films, all completed in 2006 and 2007, titled Acting Lessons, Vermilion (That’s All I Remember) and Mirror.
As an important aspect of her art-making practice for over a decade, artist Anna Gaskell’s films elaborate on the narratives and themes that inform her photographs. In this selection of new films, Gaskell continues to find inspiration from conjuring up stories about stories, examined through the phenomena of memory. Each film in “Paint Your Own Pictures” explores the rifts in the subjectivity of perception.
Acting Lessons, for instance, is an intimate and unsettling glimpse of Gaskell rehearsing a monologue of a complex and personal episode while being directed by an acting coach. The result is a challenge to the artist’s own recollection and response to her own character’s story. In Vermilion, on the other hand, twins describe the shared experience of the most important day of their lives. The two children agree, contradict one another and even invent new specifics, trying their best to register a similar memory. Although they describe the same event, experienced first-hand, we question the truth of the event itself due to conflicting witness accounts.
For Mirror, Gaskell made a silent film that depicts an ambiguous sequence of events—a girl, seen only briefly, pauses then runs off, disappearing into a thick wood. Gaskell showed the silent film to a group of junior-high school students, and a week later recorded the students’ conflicting accounts of their own recollections. In the completed work, the students’ “narration” further complicates our understanding of the film, rather than adding clarity.
