Light Migrations Solo Exhibition – Ball State University
A solo exhibition at The Atrium Gallery at Ball State University of work in a Light Room made of deconstructed slides and work in a Dark Room of Light Projections.
Flores Ansell began experimenting with film sprockets as a way to pay homage to the process of film moving through a camera. These perforations have existed as a structural part of the film roll almost since the beginning of photography— a simple, fundamental construction to move an image forward. Before color truth, however, this movement left many behind.
By removing these film sprockets from their accompanying images, they take on an intrigue all their own, free from the substantive elements that once made them discriminatory. Flores Ansell has threaded these sprockets into a single corded structure to create overlapping strands of time. These timeline strands give deference to the history of the artform: the ages of film, the evolution of the process, and the shift in photography. Sprockets from the 50’s are adjacent to ones from the 70’s, evoking the nonlinear characteristics of time as both a process and a story. These sprockets, as objects in time, amass to bring these histories to life.
As a by-product of cutting the sprockets, Flores Ansell’s work subsequently creates flight migration installations using imagery of discarded art slide libraries that contain images of objects meant to be untouchable, distinct and separate from the viewers. The installations become an act of placing the western art canon on the wall and in flight. The 1– inch dots, which viewed at a distance, show only color and shape, but when viewed closely reveal the original images that are still present, with a shadow to accompany them. The swarms of dots constitute the reverse (or opposite) of pixilation, a shift in seeing is required.
January 2020
