Description
About this piece:
Evelyn is a nexus, combining my fascination with vintage/antique photo albums that make their way to estate/antique shop sales, personal family archives, and the rationalization of conflicting viewpoints. The photographs were taken by my mother-in-law who tended to cut off parts of family anatomy, usually heads. She even laughed about her visual editing problem.
The narrative is broken into two parts. On the right pages, the semi-fictional personal family narrative in handwritten notes informs the viewer of context and dates, an homage to my father and his photo albums. Sadly, this is not a standard habit for most families, hence the presence of family photos in estate sales. On the left pages is the fictional account of Evelyn’s emerging consciousness of cognitive dissonance. Evelyn questions if you can be a forgiving Christian while also believing in capital punishment, and if the apparent conflict of these two beliefs contributed to the development of her photographic style.
Materials:
book cloth, paper, board, cord, screw posts
About the artist:
Elsi Vassdal Ellis, as EVE Press, has produced over 155 book and broadside editions via offset, letterpress, and digital printing, and 130 unique books since 1983 in well-equipped studios, one with a view of Mt. Baker. Her work is permanently housed in over 145 collections including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, San Francisco Public Library Grabhorn Collection, Yale University Library Arts of the Book Collection, and The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, London.
