About the Artist

 

Anne Leighton Massoni

"The act of remembering is what currently drives my work. To visually navigate the stories in my mind... to remember stories that may not exist, to imagine stories not yet told. I utilize both created images and found imagery to present to the viewer this place between truth and fiction. The images themselves reinfoce the concepts of memory and often use mnemonic elements and notions of artifact to represent an underlying story which touches on the personal while still attempting the collective. The concept is rooted in the details presented... sometimes revealing and yet often holding secret. There is truth in my tales but not necessarily a truth of mine alone. There is a sense of shared ideas but uncertainty as to the origin of the authorship of those ideas."

"This place between revealing and holding secrets is what I'm after, I am interested in its intangibility. I am searching for that which we experience and cannot express... evidence of memory, evidence of experience, evidence of existence."

"Each body of work , regardless of the disparity in appearance is motivated by the same underlying themes and ideas. With different approaches in medium and minor variances in concept I am able to work with a consistent set of ideas over time. Whether I stage my images or appropriate and manipulate them, evidence of memory and the act of remembering consistently finds a place in my work."

"The series "TRACES" is rooted in both familial and fabricated truths and memories. It speaks to the residue of people forgotten - either send or receiver no longer here to put meaning to time and place of text and image. On the one hand I am utilizing the postcards that my great-grandfather's company produced and on the other I am using images and correspondence which are only connected by my own invention. Post cards are the sound-bites or snapshots of the written language... "Wish you were here", "Many happy returns of the day", "Missing you". Though postcards communicate, they don't speak to the depth of substance to perhaps anyone but the writer or recipient. However, when interlaced with imagery , the fragmented text takes on new and convoluted meanings with only our imagination to cap its possibilties. By utilizing the fragmented image as a way to step beyond those photographed to a more empathetic read, the forgotten relics of one's life begin to resonate as the "traces" of all our lives."

 

 

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