| I’ve always made pictures. My transitory adolescence from New England, to Southern California to England, and now back on the East Coast, developed in me an obsession with capturing the ephemeral. I began to make films that explored the temporal experience of evanescence, like a fleeting glance or a memory. Eventually I tried to stop time by freezing frames from my films, digitizing them on my computer to make them into pictures again. Traveling with a Polaroid camera helped me document my experience. I found that I could see more in unfamiliar, far-away places. Images captured with my Polaroid SX-70 camera while driving through foreign cities developed as soft, blurred, grainy shapes that interpreted color and space, much like paintings do. |  |
Jennifer Liston Munson
I’ve always made pictures. My transitory adolescence from New England, to Southern California to England, and now back on the East Coast, developed in me an obsession with capturing the ephemeral. I began to make films that explored the temporal experience of evanescence, like a fleeting glance or a memory. Eventually I tried to stop time by freezing frames from my films, digitizing them on my computer to make them into pictures again. Traveling with a Polaroid camera helped me document my experience. I found that I could see more in unfamiliar, far-away places. Images captured with my Polaroid SX-70 camera while driving through foreign cities developed as soft, blurred, grainy shapes that interpreted color and space, much like paintings do.Glance is a new body of work of images from Mexico City and Seville that focuses on the fleeting moments that make up personal and historical memory. It follows a continuum of shared experience in these long-lived architectural spaces by slicing out and magnifying images that are simultaneously apparent and invisible. By scanning my Polaroids back at home in my studio, images of a back-lit billboard missing its signage, a curvilinear overpass, or an obsolescent hitching post surrender context and assume new meaning. These hazy, tonal images, sometimes discernable and sometimes totally abstracted, are then filtered through a digital enlargement process. This separation from the original image allows further translation of the image by painting on panels that are layered and sanded to refer to the substance of place and the physical traces of experience.
Most of the pieces in Glance are diptychs or triptychs, employing the filmic notion of image sequencing to articulate meaning. Each painting responds to each image in different ways, sometimes completing a thought, sometimes expanding a moment, but at all times abstracting the form. Color adds to my narrative conjuring competing memories, as in the flourishing of the matador’s cape, or in rendering traces of urban decay. This considered image process resonates familiarity, and offers room for appropriation of memory for the particular viewer. The material juxtaposition of these saturated architectural components and the reflective sheen of the C-print reinforce this sensation as the viewer looks back and forth to locate an elusive memory that shifts form.
My images are there and not there simultaneously, floating in a state of memory and displacement. In making these physical objects of fleeting moments, I return to those places I visited, joining my experience with the world outside. The images can be consumed in physical space, in a glance. I’m aware that I’m looking for a place to belong in this world. By snatching glances and stitching them together by hand, my work reinvents that recognizable place.
