ANN BURKE DALY

SPECTERS: STILLS AND OUTTAKES:

Part of the umbrella project Conversations and Specters.

Specters: Stills and Outtakes (the Trouble with Translation) is a largescale photo installation conceptualized in June 2015, at the American Academy in Rome AAR, where I was a visiting artist. 

The Multi-panel photo installation Specters: Stills and Outtakes began as test images for a video and sound installation. An accident in proof printing (where I sent digital files from the top floor of the AAR to the basement color printer in bulk) established the paired images and through process, became an installation work. The full color bleed printing, paper selection, and close cropping refer to vernacular photo printing and the production of photographic ephemera.

Prototype images seen from my New York studio 2015; in development in the Rome studio at the AAR (2015); and in the open studio event at MASS MoCA (Artist Residency 2016). 2015-ongoing.

Thanks to the Puffin Foundation for early grant support.

Size: print size 13 in x 19 in, in pairs of 27 in x 19" in. Overall size of installation and configuration of component pairs to be determined by space of installation. Materials: Digital Prints from Video Stills and iPhone Photographs on Hannemuhle Rice Paper, Steel Tacks. Image-pairs are to be installed to excess in a given space. Conversations & Specters was selected by Creative Capital for On Our Radar, 2016.

Conversations and Specters In brief: This multimedia reflection on the Transición to democracy (1978) following the death of Dictator Franco ('75) and the urban youth movement of La Movida Madrileña of this era, follows up on previous installations, exhibits, and related works in which I have explored the contradictions of narrative, self-­definition, and their relation to collective institutions such as the family and the state through questions surrounding documents and the conventions of documentary practices. This project asks whether a cultural haunting has taken place in the aftermath of the Guerre Civil (the Spanish Civil War '36-'39) and of the Dictatorship ('39-'75). 

"I began considering this project while living for several years as an expatriate in Madrid, experiencing translation and interpretation difficulty everyday, and wondering about this turbulent time period which I didn't hear discussed much at the time (2008-2011). My position as cultural outsider is structural to the project, to foreground the fissures of translation, narrative, and interpretation, and to consider memory as translation. I view the slippages and forgetting spaces as poignant and radically generative. This project stages through intimate conversations, the difficulty of grasping what has happened, held in tension with the desire to understand, to comprehend." –A. Daly