[SLOW] DRIFT, 2017 (L – R) Beach, Field, Water, Atmosphere, Mountain, Clouds, and White Light.



[Slow] Drift, the main installation in my solo exhibition Over Time, is a series of digitally printed long poly-sheer banners that depict the gradual transformation and deterioration of a single found image as it is successively photocopied into abstraction. 

Accompanied by a small publication with text by Penelope Smart here 


OVER TIME
January 27 – April 22, 2018


Curated by Mireille Eagan 
The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery
St. John's Newfoundland and Labrador 

www.therooms.ca 

For many years, Hazel May Eckert has built a personal archive of photographs that she finds visually interesting. Gathered from magazines, newspapers, and the internet, she plucks them from their original context. With this new body of work, Eckert Xeroxed a selection of these images repeatedly, observing how their unique characteristics distort and dissolve over time. With each photocopy, the image becomes a distant relative of the original.

Eckert’s process is a poetic consideration of the nature of images in a culture’s visual memory — its history as told through its photos and reproductions. She explores how, in a digital era, an image’s social significance is no longer attached to the idea of an original, but to the transient nature of a copy. Eckert’s textiles evoke the experience of scrolling through social media sites, briefly accessing images that are immaterial, changeable, and increasingly divorced from their initial context as they are circulated. She shows that, much like memory itself, there is a growing distance each time something is revisited, progressively becoming a trace of what once was.

Mireille Eagan
Curator of Contemporary Art

[MOSS] GENERATIONAL PHOTOCOPIES 1–20 2017

Archival Inkjet reproductions on bond paper

In the exhibition Over Time, [Moss] Generational Photocopies offered viewers insight into the process behind the creation of photo-based installation [Slow] Drift. Working with a large number of images I experimented with visual alteration caused by repeated analog photocopying. In this work two topographical photos are placed side-by-side, becoming one as the colours merge. Like the polysheer banners each frame is a copy of the one proceeding it.

Using Format