Amy Friend: Dare alla Luca
Amy grew up on the outskirts of Windsor, Ontario, Canada where the Detroit River meets Lake St.Clair. She studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto before embarking on intermittent travels through Europe, Morocco, Cuba and the United States.She received a BFA Honours degree and BEd degree from York University, Toronto as well as an MFA from the University of Windsor, where she received a Social Sciences and Humanities Grant as well as an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
In the Dare alla Luce series, I initial responded to a collection of vintage photographs, retrieved through a variety of sources. Through hand-manipulated interventions I altered and subsequently re-photographed the images making photographs that would oscillate between what is present and what is absent. I aim to comment on the fragile quality of the photographic object but also to the equal fragility of our lives, our history. All are lost so easily.
In this series I wanted to work with photographs that I did not have a direct connection to. For that reason I searched vintage shops, the internet and auctions to collect a series of images. Through the act of collecting I began to interpret these photographs as “lost” or even “dead”. Their primary connections were severed which resulted in a removal of their original meaning to a certain degree.
In my methodology I like to “play” – to examine what I am looking at, so I might figure out what drew me to specific photographs. I considered why a photograph is or is not interesting to me. During this process I could not shake the question, “What is a photograph? What is its’ material quality, what does this material mean? and how does our relationship change with photographs over time?”
In my explorations the notations or lack of notations on the photographs became significant. If there were details written on the photographs I included them in the titles, but if there were none, I used this lack of reference to connect my thoughts about what a photographic is in relation to the medium but also to actual photographic processes.
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