Vesna Pavlovic
Illuminated Archive
May 22–Sept 28, 2014
“Expanding the photographic image beyond its frame, traditional format, and narrative is central to my artistic strategies,” claims Vesna Pavlovic, a Serbian-born, Nashville-based artist. Her Intersections project, Illuminated Archive, created specifically for the Phillips, attests to her words. It includes a 35-foot translucent curtain with digitally manipulated archival images that hangs over the three-story window in the museum’s Sant Building stairwell, along with three related c-prints displayed on each floor of the space.
By engaging with the Phillips’s archives and the photo-documentation of past exhibitions, Pavlovic delves into the history of the exhibition display as a window into the museum experience that lingers between private and public, subjective and socially and culturally constructed categories. In addition, by working with large 8-x-10-inch archival negatives and overlaying them during the process of scanning, the artist creates opaque and ghostly images that explore the idea of transparency, photographic, historic, and symbolic. “I use transparency as a connecting element to tie together history, museum collection, and documentation, and the representation of the photographic medium itself,” says Pavlovi?. “For my Intersections project, I looked for ways to connect the museum’s archive with its architectural space, addressing the collection beyond the traditional archival format.”
Read more...
All images courtesy of Lee Stalsworth
