July 13, 2013 through August 06, 2013
Bill Vaccaro - “The Things She Left Behind”
Please join us on Saturday evening July 13, 2013 6-9pm for the artists’ reception of our Summer Showcase,
and help us welcome the artists who are opening with three separate new bodies of work.
Bill Vaccaro – “The Things She Left Behind” • Erin Malone “The Park” • Michael Kirchoff “Fractured View”
The Things She Left Behind
It was the summer of 1995 when my first wife suddenly died. Our adopted son was only 2-1/2 years old. While we eventually were able to achieve some sense of normalcy in our lives after years of grief and loss, it was never easy for him to deal with the feeling that, to use his own words, that he was robbed. Our son, now a young adult, remembers little about the person who he calls his mom.
Several months after her death, I gathered together many of her favorite things and put them in an old storage chest donated by close friends. These included diaries, sketchbooks, favorite jewelry, photographs, things she sewed and knitted ‚ even the very possessions she carried with her the day she died ‚ so he could have something that truly belonged to her, even as he struggled to remember this now mysterious person who had loved him so dearly.
But how does one visually depict those fragments of memory that remain when someone so young loses a parent and all that’s left are her treasured possessions. I chose to combine the wet plate collodion process with alternative print processes to show what it might be like to see through the eyes of a child still struggling to recall a significant part of his past that’s been clouded forever by the relentlessness of time.
~ Bill Vaccaro
All the images in this series were originally shot using the wet plate collodion process. The plates (glass ambrotypes and tintypes) were then scanned and converted into enlarged digital negatives. The resulting contact prints were handcoated on gelatin sized Arches Platine paper using the Ziatype process, a palladium based print out process.
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