centre d'artistes.artist run centre
exhibition from 21/03/08 to 11/04/08
opening: fri 21/03/08 at 7pm
artist talk: fri 11/04/08 at 6pm; closing party at 7pm
at Galerie Werner Whitman, 5441 Waverly, Montréal
gallery hours: Saturday 12pm to 5pm and by appointment
info@wernerwhitman.com
The Galerie Werner Whitman, in co-production with articule Special Projects, is pleased to present Kim Waldron's The Dad Tapes / The Mom Photographs exhibition. This installation is comprised of two new artworks titled Sunsets (2007) and Chronology (2007). Both pieces reframe documentation Waldron's parents produced through out her youth. Combining her father's footage with her mother's still images, Waldron weaves together a detailed portrait of family life at the end of the 20th century.
The video Chronology consists of a collection of short clips that span about an hour. Waldron specifically chose footage where her father's filming focused on what her mother was photographing, from an archive that began in 1977 and continued until 2002. Within these selections, Waldron embedded the still images her mother took. Throughout this archive, as years pass and the kids grow up, there is a bittersweet sensation of loss and futility within the whole process of documentation.
Although the footage testifies to a particular personal history, the final work speaks more of a collective experience of families choreographing themselves for the camera. In this way the work restages her family as a case study of a specific time, period and class that underlines how memory is influenced by shifting visual styles. As dates and locations are accumulated, one can see how our sense of time is marked by shifts of fashion and décor rather than by ritual or culture.
In the second work, Sunsets, Waldron similarly uses her parent's taping and photography to examine their repetitive preoccupation with capturing the "timeless" subject of the sunset. While the intention of the documents was to preserve these beautiful moments forever, the result again is an intensified sense of loss, mediation and ephemerality.
Kim Waldron was born in Montreal, Quebec and graduated from NSCAD University in 2003. Her art practice, focused almost exclusively on photographic self-portraiture, combines real subjects with fictional situations in order to question contemporary social dynamics. She has exhibited across Canada, most notably at Khyber Centre for the Arts, Gallery 44, Art Gallery of Windsor, La Centrale and Eastern Edge Gallery. She recently returned from a three-month residency in Vienna offered by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.