Anne Leighton Massoni

Holding

July 5 - September 5, 2013

The series Holding utilizes created images and found photographs to present a place between truth and fiction. These contrasting images sit side by side with a thin line painted across their surface, drawing imagined connections. The images themselves reinforce the concepts of memory and often use mnemonic elements and notions of artifact to represent an underlying story, which touches on the personal while still attempting the collective.

I combine photographs I’ve made of empty places – spaces once inhabited or currently inhabited but with no one present – with found photographs of times that no longer exist – images that are empty of personal memory – and then paint a thin line to draw a literal point of connection from one image to the next. The line, like a strand of DNA, ties the images, separated by generations, to one another. The line is often initiated in the found photograph by pointing to the senses – taste, smell, touch, sound – to a point in the contemporary image that speaks to the residues left behind by current or past inhabitants.

My intention is to make several “chapters” of the Holding series, each dedicated to a person of influence in my life which serves to establish place, lineage, and narrative in each chapter. Leaning on the notion of the “book” as narrative, chapters are titled in “honor of” and each diptych’s title utilizes the complexity of language to help navigate the viewer to underlying connections and conundrums – the narratives of the diptychs are often as rich as they are convoluted. Each “chapter’s” photographs are made in the location of the honoree’s “home” and while appropriated photographs are collected in the same location, they are not necessarily of that place. To date three chapters have been made with a forthcoming chapter to be completed in late 2013.

In the series Holding, as with most of my work, I visually navigate the stories in my mind – remembers stories that may, or may not exist, imagines stories not yet told. The concept is rooted in the details presented – sometimes revealing and yet often holding secret, there is truth in the tales but not necessarily a truth of mine alone. I am interested in the intangibility of this middle ground, I am searching for that which we experience and cannot express – evidence of memory, evidence of experience, evidence of existence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Anne Leighton Massoni, is the Program Director of Photography at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to teaching at UArts she has held professorships at Marshall University, Cornell University, Tyler School of Art, Washington College, Memphis College of Art and Monmouth University.

Massoni graduated with an MFA in Photography from Ohio University and a BA in Photography and Anthropology from Connecticut College. Her work relates to ideas of both real and fabricated memories, using a variety of film and digital techniques.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally including the H. F. Johnson Museum in New York, NIH in Washington, DC, the Allen Sheppard Gallery in New York City, the East End Film Festival in London, England and IlCantinonearte Teatri e Galleria del Grifo in Montepulciano, Italy. Recent publications of her work include ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art and SpostaMenti, an exhibition catalog of her series “Holding”. She serves as the Chair of Society for Photographic Education’s Mid Atlantic region. http://www.anneleightonmassoni.com/