Oct 14 - Nov 12, 2005
Erasers
35mm black-and white film transferred to DVD
duration: 10 minute film loop
dimensions variable
Anna Gaskell´s third solo exhibition at Gisela Capitain presents a new film installation titled Erasers.
This project is derived from a collaboration between Anna Gaskell and nine teenaged girls attending Clinton Junior High School located in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. Anna recited a real-life story to the group of girls, instructing them only to listen to her story. One week later, Anna met the same girls at the Atlantic Stage Theater, a historic off-Brodway theater in New York, and filmed each of the nine girls separately re-telling Anna´s story on camera in the best way that they could remember it.
„The main characters in my narrative work are often children. I romanticize my subjects only to the extent that I am drawn to the possibility of finding an honesty of emotion that may resonate in our very adult world but can be found nowhere in it. Let’s say, for example, we consider fear. Fear is an emotion that doesn’t grow old. Our first experience of being scared out of our wits informs the way we deal with the next time, and from there the next, and so on. Some may posit that with age we begin to intellectualize our emotional responses, and that reason and common sense prevail. This may be so on the surface of things. But I am mostly curious in that initial uninhibited response, the first link in the chain. Years of ingrained logic and experience may accumulate, but none of it can unseat that first raw feeling from the gut. It’s this gut reaction that has to do with the recognition of an experience, so in this case it would be the first memory of fear. It’s this kind of memory play that I try to elicit in my work.“
The resulting black & white film, portrays each girl alone, candidly recalling her own version of the original story. Each of the pictured girls transforms into the new narrator, highlighting specific characters, places and events from the original story. This film is reminiscent of a documentary with its straightforward visual format and its earnest quality. However, through Anna´s editing of her original footage, the film shifts perspectives, voices, and time sequences, creating a new dramatic chain of events that increases the overall duration of the original story.