| This 1918 ArtSPACE exhibition is comprised of a series of portraits relating to childhood and the collective nostalgia for the past. These images explore the selective and elusive quality of memory that shapes our histories and questions why we sometimes tend to recreate, rather than recall, our childhood. Some of these images are framed within a darkened vignette reminiscent of grainy, dissolved stills taken from an old Super 8 home movie camera. They are tender, silent and contemplative images that seem to be suspended in the timeless realm of reminiscence. |  |
Of Blessed Memory – Lisa Tomasetti
This 1918 ArtSPACE exhibition is comprised of a series of portraits relating to childhood and the collective nostalgia for the past. These images explore the selective and elusive quality of memory that shapes our histories and questions why we sometimes tend to recreate, rather than recall, our childhood.
Some of these images are framed within a darkened vignette reminiscent of grainy, dissolved stills taken from an old Super 8 home movie camera. They are tender, silent and contemplative images that seem to be suspended in the timeless realm of reminiscence.
Other portraits are more contained and classical images with a strong similarity to figurative painting—especially the Old Master paintings and early Renaissance profile portraits of women. Here, there is a sense of growth as figures emerge from darkness and onto the stillness of image. Those pictured sometimes look directly into the lens, as if into a mirror, engaging the viewer with their gaze, while other subjects appear completely cocooned within the world of the image.
The work here is an exploration of memory, the feminine and the presumed innocence of children. In them, open-ended narrative is loaded into a single frame and any sense of time is conflated. Colour, figure and gesture are choreographed for the viewer so that he or she might recognize that a story is being told. Yet, references remain oblique and the meaning of the image is reliant on the viewer investing it with their own trains of thought.
