The images used in this performance are from a collection of slides created in the 1950's by my paternal Great Grandpa when he, and my Great Grandma, moved to the Okanagan Valley with Grandpa Jones. Grandpa Jones was a military man, working in the NAVY (let it be clear). He was a fitness and physical education instructor. Now, he curls. Great Grandpa Jones was an FM radio dispatcher*, and Great Gram was an active crocheter and made many afghans.
I am interested in the ways we remember and the tricks and plots that are invented in order to hold onto something that once was. I have witnessed an ordinary seam of water and beach, surrounded in the near distance by embracing mountains, become crucial to maintenance of the past in order to trudge through the present. The significance of this space and land was established through ritualized visitations and an over powering desire to remember.
(lynn) adopts the body, or the carrier, as both canvas and container, providing dimension and movement to a personal collection of archival imagery. The landscape’s repressed memory is revealed through the body, and place is memorialized through a series of gestures. The body holds the landscape and is imprinted with the potential to remember.
Over time, the body, craved escape from the very honest landscape cloaked around the skin. The carrier, exhausted with the task to contain all points of memory on its own, and defeated with its inability to do so, is juxtaposed with the resilient and consistent, yet changing landscape; creating a relationship that is founded with the same needs that remembering has with forgetting. In this work the body holds the landscape and becomes itself a landscape of memory.
My investigation into the landscape's potential to contain or describe memory begins with photographs. Lucy Lippard suggests that, “images can survive but lose their places…photographs root other places in one time, one moment”[1]. The organization of space (i.e. the landscape) in combination with the body, the narrator, the act of telling the memory defines a place. This work sparks the relationship, or dependence rather, between the body and the archival image as both are portions of the memorial.
This work is dedicated to my mother deborah lynn froese.
Screenings of this work were at a Breast Cancer Fundraiser in Sackville, New Brunswick, we well as O.k.Quoi Compemporary Arts Festival in Sackville. And was part of the exhibition esturary at Galerie VAV Gallery in 2008.
*And email was sent to me from my Grandpa Jones, this is what he said:
Hi love, read your dissertation and would like to correct one area. Don Jones was a ham or amateur radio operator, which in turn was his hobby, which he started in Alberta long before he met my mother, and carried on the rest of his life. You had to qualify first with the Morse code and use the telegraph key when contacting other hams through out the world. Then you had to qualify again to transmit using voice only, which also meant a change in the radio equipment used. These hams used to make their own transmitters and receivers in the early days, which was another reason that they all used the Morse code because the equipment was easier for them to build. It was after the 2nd war that a lot of surplus equipment became available and more refined, and as money became more plentiful better radios were produced. Don's brother Stan was a telegraph operator and served in the merchant navy during the war and after. Stan was also, or may still be, a ham radio operator. So there is my little tale to hopefully give you a better idea of what Great Grandpa and his brother were involved with from a young age. The exact dates I'm not sure of. I hope you don't think I'm being picky. It was just something I saw and thought I could clarify… I think maybe I should quit now as this has turned out to be a monster of an email. Have fun, we will be thinking of you and the rest of the clan every day and always. Love and kisses Gram & Gramps
[1] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local – Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. (New York: The New Press, 1997), page 57.
Amazing work. Thanks Thea.
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