Suzanne Mooney (and Henry A. Stanley)
Video projection, 11mins, looped with sound by Giles Packham
2018
In the video projection On Glass, sits an Image (2018) a photograph oscillation between image and object. Created out of destruction, the work considers how images can be thought of as fragments, encompassing various temporal registers. Taking the form of a projected slideshow, a slow procession of jagged pieces from a single black-and-white picture appears one after another. Each is a glimpse of a mountainous landscape, overcast skies, exposed rock, and distant woodlands, composed within an irregular form. The original picture, taken in 1903 by the photographer Henry A. Stanley, depicts the summit view of Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire. Captured on a glass plate negative, this photographic object circulated for over a century before I deliberately smashed it.
What emerges from the destruction of a historical document, leads to the construction of new ways of seeing and understanding the object/image. Remaining on view for twenty seconds, the fragments appear hovering out of a black void, one after another. While containing an impression of the complete image, the viewer is stopped from ‘making it whole again’. By fragmenting the negative into multiple abstractions, each irregular shard finds completeness. My intention with ‘On Glass, sits an Image’ was to emphasize the photo object’s inherent materiality and shift our understanding of time embedded in a photograph. The fragmentation of a glass plate negative allowed me to explore a way to see both image content and material substrate concurrently. Writing about fragments, Jacqueline Lichtenstein says “…If we see a thing as both a sign and thing simultaneously, our perception comprises of two conflicting modes of presence. The thing can reveal as a sign what it hides as a thing.” The object of inquiry has been violently and permanently disrupted to focus on these modes of presence, but also to alter how it exists within a continuous and fluid process of production, exchange, and consumption.
