20/20 Vision

The Art of Contemporary University Printmaking

Beth Grabowski

Nostalgia was first described as a disease in the 19th century and referred to the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land, and fears never to see it again.  In contemporary contexts, it is a word that conjures paradoxical and layered associations.  Often considered a pejorative term, it references a retrograde attitude that idealizes history and stands counter to progression.  Yet as a reaction against a modernist agenda of “progress,” nostalgia intimates a suspicion of an ever-improving future.  Skeptical, reflective and voyeuristic, it illuminates the space of longing.

It is this ambivalent nostalgia that I explore in my current work.  The images began with family photographs.   I operate in the contemporaneous moment, indulging my sentimentality by working with images of the ones I adore.  Yet the photographic moment of the source material also contains the seeds of history, sprouting almost instantaneously to become past and loss.  The intentional manipulation of the images toward strangeness embodies both desire and ambivalence of familial, and especially maternal, space. The transformation brought on through process both enhances a sense of past while it denies the betrayal of time, suggesting another proposition that contains facets of truth, fantasy, desire, pride and regret.

For this work, the entire archive of family memorabilia and the detritus of domestic life has become my resource material.  As I rehearse the narratives contained in each photograph, I reconsider these images from a perspective of maternal familial relationship and its myriad of contradictory emotions.  I am interested in the “voice” of the photographic information as it is in conversation with the layers that simultaneously reveal and conceal, enhance and suppress.