Extract from essay by Jennifer Kalionis, “Two Thousand and Seven”, Artdate, Issue 84: Feb/Mar 2008. Angela Black paints recollections, sensations, time and thoughts. Her works are often hazy, like a foggy memory, but from this blurring and abstraction the viewer can connect with the trace memories and fleeting thoughts of a time long gone. The soft lines and glowing colours of the paint that she manipulates on the canvas reveal her memories, reconstructed and edited from blurred cine film stills her father took. Black focuses on the reconstruction of glimpses of her past, the quick and yet sinuous editing that we all do in our minds when reminiscing. Black’s preoccupation with memory, time and identity could have proven too autobiographical for the viewer to permeate, but she tackles these universal ideas well, and so her memories could be ours. The artist is especially interested in the editing process that goes on in our minds - we may remove or replace thoughts and remembrances with those given to us by other people, by fiction and by our own imaginative fancy. This disjuncture between truth and reality, the way memories dissolve into one another is captured beautifully in works such as Almost Lost, and Hover. Memories are seldom structured, perfect or complete. Black focuses on the temporal element of memory and the past, capturing ‘fugitive moments’, that intrigue and tease the mind. In the work In the Flow the viewer is given a glimpse, a sensation of a young girl speeding on a bike, the wind tugging at her hair. This moment is frozen in time, the sensation is remembered, but perhaps the extraneous circumstances of place, time of day, who was there, are indistinct, forgotten, lost. These works are striking, familiar, and sometimes disquieting. In the dark and Lynchian The Unforgotten, the carousel seems to endlessly turn, the neon lights dance as a girl sits on a white horse, watched by people lingering in the shadows. Similarly, in and the day stood still a small girl feeding birds at a fountain is frozen in time, and there is an unsettling sensation beneath the familiar scene. Black has exposed the fissures between memories, and disrupted our own ideas about memories and personal narratives. [ back ] Angela Black