Thomas Hellstrom
www.thomashellstrom.net
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Artist Statement
My work proceeds from a desire to slow and sustain a moving image. Originating from brief excerpts of cinema and video, often less than one minute in duration, each project is composed of two elements: a series of digital prints and a leporello (an Italian term for a book whose pages are both folded and continuous). Produced by hand in small editions the leporello slows cinematic grammar to a standstill rendering discrete and immobile pages culled from the irretrievable passing of moving images. In its own right the leporello is a film, experienced in another form. The prints also isolate the ephemeral moving image to contemplate the visual and narrative richness they suggest. In the contemplation of a brief encounter with a subject, my projects consider the possibilities of video and digital imaging technology in tangible, analog terms.
UNREMEMBERING
UNREMEMBERING consists of images taken in NY in 2003, only finding completion at a Christmas Carnival in Berlin one year later. The length of the project comes as no surprise. Thomas' works document experience, and experience only comes to know it's true face over time.
Thomas' projects consists in two parts: a leporello, an Italian term for an artist book whose pages are both folded and continuous, and a complementing series of ink jet prints. Thomas is debuting UNREMEMBERING, his most ambitious leporello to date, at Buzzer Thirty. For the first time Thomas has incorporated a text within the context of his images a quotation from the Japanese intellectual Samura Koichi:
Who says that time heals all wounds?
It would be better to say
that times everything except wounds.
With time,
the hurt of separation
loses its real limits.
With time,
the desired body
will soon disappear,
And if the desiring body
has already ceased to exist for the other
then what remains is a wound
disembodied.
He complements the sentiment of the text through a series of video stills of amusement rides in Berlin, among them the largest prints he has produced at 3x5 feet. Absent of an identifiable context, these images exist as fragments of experience that can only tug at the apparatus of memory. The exhibition presents what is not, or cannot, be remembered: an UNREMEMBERING.
Sale pieces (2003-05):
Ink jet prints on Somerset velvet photo enhanced paper 100% cotton rag
Editions of five
12.5 x 16.6"
$800. framed
$600. unframed
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