From a long, narrow and reverberant corridor in the Loyola
Building at Saint Mary’s University, visitors cross a threshold into
the gallery’s quiet plain.
First conscious of the evaporation of sound, gallery-goers are met
by a strong but silent visual: a triptych on a table called “Questions
She’ll Never Answer,” the introduction to a show called Somewhere in
Between, by Toronto artist Sara Angelucci.
A framed photo of the artist’s mother, on the deck of the boat that
brought her across the Atlantic from Italy to Canada, is flanked by two
video monitors, also contained in frames. For one, the artist has
recreated the skirt worn by her mother, its embroidered hem waving in
the wind. A series of questions rise and fade, the text written across
the fluttering fabric. The other monitor maintains a steady view to the
endless ocean, a still shot if it wasn’t for the motion of the
waves.
Angelucci created the piece during her grad studies at NSCAD, where
she received her MFA in 1998. It grew out of a visit to Pier 21, before
it was a museum. “A bunch of us walked around in these buildings and it
made a huge impression on me: ‘Oh my god, this is where they landed on
their boat,'” she recalls from Toronto. “It was the first piece where I
was really trying to grapple with those issues,” Angelucci says. “The
questions I didn’t ask” about the crossing, a central motif in stories
of immigration, and of the decision to come to Canada.
Before she came to school in Halifax, the artist lost both her
parents in close succession. While she confronts the loss of her mother
in “Questions,” Angelucci reconsiders her relationship with her father,
and his absence, in “Everything in My Father’s Wallet/Everything in My
Wallet” (2005).
“It’s a taxonomy,” says Robin Metcalfe, the gallery’s
director/curator, pointing out how each item is shot directly, the
image centred on a square tablet.
Like photographer Arnaud Maggs, Angelucci takes a neutral, almost
detached view to the items, says Metcalfe. “She doesn’t editorialize,
just presents them and opens up all kinds of fields of possible
meaning.”
By comparing the receipts father and daughter have kept, the charge
cards, ID, documents and photos they’ve carried, the viewer appreciates
the differences (personal and generational) between Orfeo and Sara
Angelucci, but also sees similarities, patterns and the continued
connections shared by the two. The personality and identity of both
emerge and there’s a metaphorical crossing of the division between life
and death, absence and presence.
According to Angelucci, the whole of Somewhere in Between, an economic show of rich, colour-saturated chromogenic prints that
originated at Cambridge Galleries, is “me trying to come to terms with
my own identity and my own history.” At past openings, visitors have
responded in kind. “They start talking about their own history.”
Part of being human is to examine one’s own life for connection and
shared experiences with others, starting with one’s family and moving
outward. In other words, the artist illuminates a larger, universal
story through the telling of her own. It’s a powerful, difficult and
constructive thing to do.
For “Regular 8” (2009), Angelucci researched and then staged models
in the popular dress, pose, gesture, style and locations of the late
1950s, the age when, Metcalfe points out, Kodachrome, colour film and
Super-8 home movies arrived and were popularized by working and
middle-class families. “What we remember is shaped by the media we use
to remember it.”
“Those are the ones that move away more from an ‘immigrant story’
and look at the vernacular,” says Angelucci, “how people develop their
own mythology of the family, where those stories come from.”
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2009.