panoramic picture ~ statement

Entitled, “My Grandmother’s Backyard” the panoramic portrait recalls summers spent at my grandmother’s home in southwestern Ontario when I was a child. The pictures that make up this portrayal focus on events of particular relevance to a young girl’s childhood experience.  Tea parties, wedding and prom preparations, pot-luck suppers and backyard birthday parties: all activities that define women’s social experience and, as well, give shape to ideas of femininity.  In this way the portrait is also a representation of the formation of gendered identity.

Taking its form from a series of enlarged 8mm home movie stills, the composite portrait is made up of grainy, slightly fuzzy and seemingly out of focus imagery.  The extreme enlargement lends the pictures a sense of fragility and incompleteness–of something disappearing or falling away.  The intensified colour,  a characteristic of Technicolor film stock used in the 1950s and associated with the women’s film or melodrama, adds a further historical dimension, dating the portrait by situating  the ‘story’ in the past and imparting a sense of melodrama.  Perhaps even more importantly the combination of strong colours and dissipated imagery suggests that memories might be most intense as they evaporate.

Establishing a rhythmic visual motif throughout the piece, the form and colour palette of the teacup photograph is echoed, although inverted, in the form and colours of the dresses. The arrangement of the images is meant to suggest the experience of looking back and watching time pass, with the beginning and ending images presenting figures entering and leaving the panorama, opening and closing the memory narrative.