Film Ends
Twelve photographs from my recent Film Ends series will be shown in the forthcoming exhibit at The Laboratory, Version 1 along with a number of other artists. The show opens Saturday, June 8th. If you’re in Easthampton, Massachusetts in June or July, stop by the Loft Parlor at Mill 180.
Artist Statement
Nikki Gardner
For this photographic body of work, Film Ends, I’m interested in film as material, chance, and a record of abstract time. The photographs are prints of the discarded ends of 35 mm color negative film that have been sent off to be developed in a lab, thereby removing an elements of control in both capturing and developing the photograph.
Photographs are rarely the things pictured. They are conceptual and mechanical reproductions of a thing past. I’m interested in exploring the photographic medium of film as the space of beginnings and endings, what happens between how a thing is depicted. Each photograph presented here came from the first and last shots on a roll of film. Instead of discarding the ends, I collected them. As a result of this process, the photographs are symbolic abstractions, marked by scratches or stickers placed on the emulsion by whoever processed the film at the lab. The negatives were digitally scanned, processed, then digitally printed and adhered to wood panels.
Analog photography is first an expression of the medium: light, form, shape, and color. Secondly, it’s an expression of what the photograph depicts. In this series of photographs, form shapes content. The compositional elements are the subject, which become material assemblages open to interpretation.
