My artwork has often dealt with memory. The memories revealed to me in my family’s old photos are sometimes accurate, and sometimes not quite as accurate as I think I remember. I’ve started looking at other artists who also work with mnemonic and imagined realities. Anne Massoni is one of those artists.

In her artist statement Anne says that her work is currently driven by the act of remembering. Anne imagines stories that have not yet been told or may not exist as she visually navigates these stories in her mind. She presents this place between fiction and truth to the viewer using both created imagery and found imagery. Concepts of memory are reinforced by the images themselves – using notions of artifact and mnemonic elements to represent an underlying story.

In her “Fairytale Princess Skirt Series”  a beautiful skirt from a Philadelphia second hand shop became a vehicle to the memory. Anne uses the skirt as a constant in her photographs of staged fairy tales.

40 inch by 40 inch digital prints show shirtless men and women standing in her “Enchanted Forest” wearing the skirt. In works like “melissa as the woman from the old woman who lived in a shoe” and “john as the prince from cinderella” visions of childhood are associated with her fairytales to be interpreted by the adult mind.

This photo of the installation of the “Fairytale Princess Skirt Series” shows how she includes elements of actual trees and vines with her “Enchanted Forest” location photos.

Memories are also interpreted in my favorite series of Anne’s, “Memoria & Mnasthai”. I especially like her assemblage technique in this 2-part series. She uses photos of babies dressed in white in the Memoria series, printed on vellum and stitched to white cloth. With hanging threads they overlap, creating semi-transparent layers of childhood memories. In her Mnasthai series she uses 125 found photos of babies in white and hangs them with grey string tied around each. In addition to childhood they are also about death she says. Their layers hide stories of the ephemeral, domesticity, sweetness and regret.

Her “Traces”series uses fragmented postcard images layered with recombined text to reveal traces of past lives. The text is layered over the images and placed on waxed digital prints. These fragments are the residue of forgotten people she says. The meaning of the place or time can’t be explained by the sender or receiver who are no longer here. “The forgotten relics of one’s life begin to resonate as the “Traces” of all of our lives,” Anne says in her website description.

Additional images of Anne’s constructed memories can be explored in more detail on her website: http://www.annemassoni.com.

All images are copyrighted by Anne Leighton Massoni

Through the magic of social media I recently rediscovered an Alpha Xi Delta sorority sister from my days at RIT. In a sorority that was mostly business and retailing majors, Joyce Hill and I were two of the few sisters who were Art & Design majors. We also happened to be in the same class. I hadn’t seen Joyce’s artwork since those days in the late 1960s. The collage work she has been producing in recent years is inspiring and begs a closer look.

She is fascinated by communication her artist’s statement says. Her recent works are based on graffiti she saw traveling down narrow alleys in Italy. Her work “Guitarman”
uses layers of photos and what appears to be paper textured like the ancient walls she walked by.

The crumbling ruins of the L.A. Zoo provided more inspiration for her graffiti-based layered works. “Local graffiti artists had been in these areas before me. The walls were covered with colorful markings, words and images. Some of these I could not understand but was still amazed at their beauty. Communication is not just the expression of words but in its simplest form is the transfer of thoughts through images,” Joyce said.

I admire artist’s like Joyce who work with layers of images and associated memories. Her work, “Hipsters’ Night Out” is an example of layered artwork I feel can evoke one’s own memories. In this case, of fun-filled evenings with friends.

You too maybe can relive old memories and enjoy Joyce M. Hill’s wonderful layered collages at: http://joycehillstudio.com/.

All images are copyrighted by Joyce M. Hill.