Research Catalogue

I find that Pamela Salen’s exposition ‘The Photogram as a Domestic Diary‘ has improved greatly in terms of maturity, complexity and organization and I think the process of synthesising and rewriting has been very positive and beneficial. Her personal take and original exploration of the notions of memory and home and how they inform each other and relate to one another is very compelling. Her use of the photogram as a medium to register memory and the passage of time is poetic and sensual and I think that the combination of texts, research, images and videos create a worth reading exposition.

Pamela Salen’s submission offers an engaging, poetic and powerful narrative to the field of contemporary art practice engaging with constructions of home through personal memory, historiography and the domesticity of place. The submission interweaves eloquent contextual writing, powerful personal narrative, video and photographic stills around a tightly curated sequence of investigations.

This submission is of particular interest to artists/ scholars engaged in durational and historiographical practices. Key themes underlying this submission include investigations of the present, personal narrative, everyday lived experience, embodied sites and the ‘in-between’. Those interested in notions of being with-time, as Boris Groys’ interpretation of ‘con-temporary’ might suggest, will find this submission revealing in its methods of production and presentation. Imagined and constructed very much in the present, Salen’s artworks reveal an embodied and acutely aware remembrance of the past, with streams of personal narrative flowing easily through the submission. Artists working with photographic process, both analogue and digital will find Salen’s imagery both intriguing and softly meditative, where that which is occluded becomes the reference for ones own imagination. In this sense, the work will certainly appeal to those interested in exploring the in-between, including those engaging with Deleuze’s concept of mileu (middle) or that, which is in-between.

The Photogram as Domestic Diary opens beautifully in terms of the spectrum of possibilities it unfolds; the re-imagining of place, the recounting of personal experience – remembered or invented, and for me, most pertinent is the notion of home as an embodied site of personal memory. A memory or lived or imagined experience.

The artworks produced are potent explorations of temporality and lived experience. I find them to be innovative and surprising and shifting in-between something lost and something found.

Definitions are well considered throughout adding sharpness and clarity to the artist’s development of key notions such as ‘home’. The concept of home as ‘autobiographical story’ is particularly well developed, extending a multiplicity of avenues for the reader venture into. The author draws an interesting conceptual line back to nineteenth century Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, making reference to Hammershøi’s ‘silent interiors’. This is an insightful connection, which draws me further into Salen’s photographic stills Childhood, Bedroom 2 and The Studio, Jack’s Room, where again, it is my own memory, which comes flooding back. Salen articulates her process of making clearly and inventively. These passages are a pleasure to read and are generously rewarding in their detail. The distinct processes of research, production and publication of Salen’s paper models reveal an acute understanding and empathy with home as embodied interior. The models themselves are achingly beautiful, with installation images providing a wide range of sculptural configurations.

In Salen’s conclusion, we return to the personal narrative of the author. Once again I enter a bifurcated interior, full of warm sunlight with no access to the exterior world beyond the window. For me, this is where the real poetry of these artworks rest, in the bowels of my own history, my own interior, quietly at rest until I leave this room where I am sitting, exchange the window of this screen for the window to my garden. And then…

Justy Phillips, 15^th December 2013.