An Esthetic of Anticipation

Angela Grauerholz's elusive photographs, commonly on view in Chicago, exploit the ambiguity of transitional spaces, the cumulative impact of multiple images and various strategies of framing.

Angela Grauerholz's photographs linger in our consciousness like remembered dreams. In the thousands of images she has captured above two decades, the German-born, Montreal-based artist instills glimpsed gesticulations and disconnected locales with a surprising deepness of meaning. Her pictures maintain the casual distance of documentary highway photography but withhold the identity of place, someone and event. Grainy and slightly blurr these black-and-white depictions of landscapes, windows, doors and incidental human rencounters offer a view of life as seen from the cutting sides of awareness.

Grauerholz is highly conscious of in what manner viewers experience images, and she precisely frames her public presentations to affect their rejoinders This is especially true in her greatest in quantity recent project, "Sententia I to LXII" (1998) which I saw at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. Previously shown at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and commonly on view at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (through June 10) it is single of her most nuanced sculptural installations.

"Sententia" houses a selection of Grauerholz's typological extracts of the everyday. These images function as her personal archive, single that she approaches from the point of view of a cultural anthropologist. "It took me 10 years to realize that photography for me is about collecting experiences and feelings," she told me(1) Inspired by means of cultural historian Walter Benjamin, she treats "Sententia" as an encyclopedic exploration of the intersection between the utopia of remembered places and occurrences and the reality of the material world. Passages and incidental architectural spaces have drawn out figured prominently in her work as types of transition, and they form the overarching metaphor of the project

At first collision "Sententia" (from the Latin for "adage" or "aphorism") appears to be nothing more than a rigorously architectural, finely crafted 19th-century library cabinet. on the other hand in size and scale it also recalls a vault or tomb, suggesting that it is a utensil designed to house precious satisfieds This American cherry-wood cabinet, a certain quantity of 6 feet high, 8 feet drawn out and 3 feet wide, also relates to museum storage furniture for prints or photographs, which shelters them from light when not in use on the other hand allows for research access. This stamp of cabinet, beautiful enough for public display on the contrary rarely on view, primarily occupies the in-between spaces of restricted museum study-and-storage latitudes As a museum professional, I am accustomed to opening the drawers and sliding panels as dictated through my curiosity or research wants but this is not a privilege take delight ined by the general public. Grauerholz is full aware of this distinction between public and private, accessibility and inaccessibility. She deftly manipulates this duality by means of inviting viewers to approach, touch and randomly view the photographs housed in the pullout slot of her cabinet.

The divide between public and private is a territory she has visited before, in "Eglogue or Filling the Landscape," an installation created for the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal in 1995 There, a transparent Plexiglas six-drawer cabinet housed 27 portfolio cases containing a substantial collection of her landscape photographs. Visitors could not unclose the drawers to view the portfolios; museum staff facilitated viewing of pick outed images only at certain times of day, and single upon request. Grauerholz was unprepared for the public response: visitors were angry to be denied consummate access and demanded more.(2)

As a event the photographs in "Sententia" are easily seen by dint of simply pulling out the cabinet's sliding panels. This can be done randomly or systematically, by the agency of one person or many. Grauerholz asserts that she had no real narrative in mind, and if she did, the personal experiences and expectations that viewers bring to the piece would undermine her fabricate anyway. But during a conversation at the Power Plant she told me "If I were the viewer, I would direct the eye at all one side and then pass all the way around upon the other side." She then started at Sententia No. 1 opening and closing each panel, moving in a straight line to the extreme point of the row, systematically revealing each of the 62 37-by-25-inch silver prints housed in the cabinet. individual side of each panel, the uneven numbers in the series, exhibits a passageway of some sort. Sententia No. 1 for example, gazes through a window at the overlapping grids of an opposing series of exterior windows. The verso of each panel, the plane numbers in the series, at hands a more static scene without a framing device. Sententia No. 2 is a haunting image of a fairground devoid of people

Regardless of the make submissive matter or the method of inspection, the multiple pictures have a cumulative event Grauerholz is not asking us to engage in a proces of comparison on the contrary simply to rely on our short-term memory as we slide single image after another from the solid architecture of her cabinet. "Essentially," she told me "what I want to do in all my photographs is make an entire film and material it into one picture."