Vanessa Albury

Brooklyn, NY
Residency: May-June 2017

Residency projects description
While on residence at Sculpture Space, my plan was to create a hut-like Trash Camera Obscura and a few smaller Camera Obscura, but I ended up doing the former and exploring other interests that had been brewing in the back of my mind, which I hadn't had a chance to delve into in my studio at home.
 
Trash Camera Obscura I
Trash Camera Obscura is the result of contemplating the existence of image, from the distant past when glaciers once covered North America and considering the possibly near future when the effects of global warming will result in dramatic changes in sea levels and impair access to electricity and thus most technology and the internet. Trash Camera Obscura is a sculptural object made from found materials that is also a functional camera, which I created from trash collected around Utica. It calls to mind earliest prehistoric occurrences of image and considers possibilities for the far future of photography amidst global climate change impacts.
 
In considering the future of our planet under the global crisis conditions predicted by scientists, I imagine an era when modern, high-tech devices are obsolete or ruins of our current high-tech culture. Camera Obscura have been part of creating artworks by artists from the Greeks to Vermeer to contemporary artists like Abelardo Morrell. However, some of the earliest Camera Obscura occurred naturally in caves and were likely used by the early cave painters. In the caves of Lascaux, France the cave paintings on the walls are of horses upside-down, suggesting the use of a Camera Obscura. Camera Obscura project the image of the exterior on the walls of the structure that are upside down, laterally reversed, in color and in live motion.
 
I built a small hut-sized Camera Obscura, a structure that is pitch dark inside except for one small aperture, with trash I collected around Utica. The hut can accommodate about 4 people, with a diameter of approximately 10 feet and a height of about 6 feet. The structure is made of aluminum frame and disassembled furniture, like a desk and a headboard, slates and fiberglass from a barn that fell down and some tree branches. I use spray foam, paint, felt and plastic trash bags to black-out the structure. I placed the primary aperture inline with the predicted location of the sun on August 21, 2017 at 2:309pm EST, the peak time of the solar eclipse visible that day. I plan to use my Trash Camera Obscura to observe and document the solar event.
 
What will our equivalent to cave paintings look like in the fall of technological era? In the throws of Climate Change, I reference a future moment in which we may once again only capture image via Camera Obscura, as our ancestors in cave dwelling times, when the infrastructure required to fuel our technology is unavailable, post-catastrophe. Since they are natural phenomena, we will always be able to generate images with the aid of a Camera Obscura.
 
Burned out (Raku Film)
The moment when a film gets jammed in a projector is unpredictable and visually arresting as the incineration of the 16mm film is magnified and projected on the big screen. This moment is surprising and destructive. The burning of a film immediately breaks the image or narrative illusion of film and grounds it in the physical and thusly sculptural reality of the medium. As a filmmaker I always secretly hope to see the film catch and melt. Inspired by the way 16mm film burns when it gets stuck in a projector, I made enlarged pieces of film remnants from clay and using the raku process, burned wood and hair onto the surface, mimicking the manner in which film melts and burns when caught in front of the beam too long.
 
Film Recorder III & Untitled (16mm Loops/ Desired State)
Film Recorder III is a working in progress. It is a pre-woven state of my painted film and the visual appeal and history of the draping 16mm film during the processing. It also relates to the hanging method I’ve developed, draping 16mm bodily from dowels. The colors correspond to bruising, relating to the trampling of my first Film Recorder pieces while they are "performed" by the viewer. My smaller Desired State pieces developed from the weaving and draping of the larger Film Recorder pieces. 16mm film is unruly and tends to fall into knots. I’ve always been interested in working with or fixing those knots, so I began doing just that at Sculpture Space. Once I began mounting them to the wall, they seemed incomplete, so I made ribbons out of clay with the raku process to mount and suspend the smaller pieces.

About the Artist
Vanessa Albury received her MFA in Studio Art from New York University, where she is currently a visiting scholar. Ken Johnson of The New York Times calls her work “haunting.” Her solo show Arctic, Future Relics opened the fall season at Nurture Art in Brooklyn, NY and was reviewed in Candid Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine and Nylon. Other solo shows include A Stilled Cascade of Image at Window Box Gallery curated by Thale Fastvold (Oslo, Norway; 2012); InWaves curated by Jan Van Woensel at Monty ABN (Antwerp, Belgium; 2012); and The Distance That Keeps You at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco (2007). Recent shows include Nor Any Drop to Drink at Grady Alexis Gallery curated by Adam Zucker, 6 Degrees at 184 Project Space, SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2017 and her two-person show Collect Light with Hedwig Brouckaert at Murray State University. Her latest inp-process work Film Recorder exhibited in Re:Re:Re: at the Old Pfizer Building and her Porthole Waves (Svalbard) series, shot during the Arctic Circle Residency, are in the traveling show Arctic Hysteria curated by LOCUS. Other recent group shows of Albury's work include Winter Collection at Kimberly Klark (NYC); Home Studio at SPRING/BREAK Art Show curated by the Sphinx (NYC); Melancholy Lover of a Vanished Space at Silverlens Gallery (Singapore); The Dream Time at Trans Pecos curated by Rachel Mason (Brooklyn); Crystal Pantomime curated by Kari Adelaide at the Poetry Project (NYC); If Love Could Have Saved You, You Would Have Lived Forever at Bellwether Gallery (NYC) and Into the Atomic Sunshine at the Puffin Room (NYC), Hillside Forum Gallery (Tokyo) and Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum (Okinawa). Albury's work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, San Francisco Guardian, The New York Times, Eyes Towards the Dove, Hyperallergic, Artiholics and art blogs. Albury has been an artist-in-residence at OxBow, Arctic Circle Residency, and Lofoten Kunstkvareteret, Project Grant and at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Albury also curates with The Sun That Never Sets (TSTNS), a nomadic, incubator film and video art project.