Meghan Ivany

Dark Black

In Dark Black, paper previously used to store family photos is captured in the lens of the scanner, the material decontextualized and free to float on a deep black background. Suspended in a non-site, stripped of reference to cultural supposition, paper becomes other than what it is: ignored material is elevated to something worthy of sustained consideration; a moment comprised of potential, where being doesn’t hinge on the supposition of utility. Subverting nostalgia as the force of value, isolating the paper used to hold photographs interrogates why certain objects are assigned significance, but not others. Deliberate attention to neglected objects is a personal defiance to social constructs of diminishment and rejection.

A fluctuating charm

Materiality, representation, and process - photography as a method of decontextualization and rearticulation of form.

Four tubes of acrylic paint, cellophane, a scanner

Boundaries imposed by self or the limitations of media and process are at times for me a creative fuel. Assigning specific parameters in which to work opens space for chance and the unknown. By narrowing what I use in certain works - media, materials, process - I surrender some control of the outcome to indeterminacy. In this case, I limited the works to four colours of acrylic paint, a roll of cellophane, and photographing the results using a high-resolution scanner. This became an exploration of the materiality of paint and its texture through lens-based imaging.

Odradek

"'Well, what's your name?' you ask him.
'Odradek,' he says.
'And where do you live?'
'No fixed abode,' he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves."
- The Cares of a Family Man, Franz Kafka, 1919

Odradek is the form which things assume in oblivion.
- Walter Benjamin, 1934

Spaces we lost to a pandemic