Dick
Averns
Jeffery
Byrd
Jane
Calvin
Albert
Chong
Joseph
DeLappe
Fay
Fair-
brother
Jim
Jipson
Heidi
Kumao
Dinh
Q.Lê
Delilah
Montoya
James
Thomas
 


Jim Jipson

Pensacola, Florida

Chamber of Memory


That some personally anxious, existential moments occur when exploring an unfamiliar dark room with a flashlight, has become a standard intro for the "dark night of the soul." It has also become axiomatic that the hidden contents we might encounter are our own. In a larger context, the whole experience of entering a public dark attic in the form of a local multiplex theater to see into someone else's attic, is a shared cultural ritual induced and expanded in these images. These are not only the aspects of our personal and trans-cultural lives stacked like sediment, but they employ as substance the ways in which we find meaning: written words, printmaking, pictures, seeing our bones by holding our fingers over a spotlight, a kind of alchemical/archival record of a personal probing of the symptomatology of contexts in which film is occasionally the recording medium. The fragments being pieced together are iconic message-carriers: bodies, torn pages, things taped, stained and overlapped, set out for examination, dissection, and understanding. The transmutation, for Jipson, is in the fortuitous associations, visual and literal, tactile and intellectual, past and present, that occur during that process. Old book pages carry both the promise of literal explanation and the denial of the same. The overall effect is one of shared discovery, as if pages of an antique private diary had come to light, complete with the clues and cryptograms of a culture awaiting decipherment.

Excerpt from NEA/SAF fellowship recipients catalog written by Allan Peterson

 

 
 
 
Chambers of Enchantment