On Jan. 10 at 7:30pm, the Elora Centre for the Arts will host the opening reception of Sara Angelucci’s Manning the Family Archive.
The exhibition brings together a number of projects created over a ten-year period inspired by images and, most recently, stories derived from Angelucci’s family archive.
Included are three distinct series. The first is a video installation entitled Questions She’ll Never Answer, which is a dialogue with a photograph of the artist’s mother taken ship-board while immigrating to Canada. The video tries to unravel its stubbornly held mysteries. Questions ranging from What colour was your dress? to What were your hopes for your new life? attempts to reconcile the loss of Angelucci’s mother, and with it, a connection to her ancestral history.
The second display is a triptych entitled She Crossed the Sea, where the sense of searching for information is accentuated as the same ship-board photo is held up against the sky, a virtual sea of blue, and turned to show the writing on the back. Angelucci said, “In its softness of focus, my mother’s image appears talismanic.
“The text, written in Italian in my mother’s hand reads: ‘Aboard this grand piazza, I turn my thoughts to you. Yours always, Nina.’ ”
This notion of flipping between image and text is developed further in the series Al Riverso (in reverse). The source photographs for that series go back to Angelucci’s family’s pre-immigration period in Italy in the early 1950s.
Angelucci said, “In our digital age, hard-drives have replaced the photo album as the keepers of memory. While we may now store thousands of images, how many of them will ever be seen and how long will a pixel last? Even with technological advancements, images seem to find a way to escape our grasp.”
Angelucci is a photo and video artist living in Toronto. She has exhibited her photography across Canada, including exhibitions at Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal, Ace Art in Winnipeg, Vu in Quebec City, the Toronto Photographer’s Workshop, the MacLaren Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Richmond Art Gallery. Her videos have been screened across Canada and included in festivals in Europe and Hong Kong.
Manning the Family Archive runs in the Minarovich Gallery until Feb.. 28. The Gallery is located at 75 Melville Street in Elora, and is open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 3:30pm, and weekends from 1:00 to 3:30pm. There is no charge for admission. For additional information, contact the Centre at 519-846-9698 or visit www.eloracentreforthearts.ca.
