Vestigium II, 2003
Inkjet prints, still from video
8.5"x11" each (72 prints in total)
Throughout her artistic production, Eshrat Erfanian has examined sites and locations as a space for memory, reconnaissance and projection. These areas operate as holding places, conjuring up aspects of the past that are both personal and distanced. In her recent works, specifically the Vestigium series, the sites and locations are demarcated through a coupling of image and text. Placed either below or beside the image, the text often indicates information such as date, time or location. Through this positioning a relationship is created as the text acts as a corresponding description or clarification of the image. The word Vestigium is derived from the Latin and refers to the mark or trace left from something that has vanished or been lost. In Vestigium II, similar to the miniature paintings of Vestigium I, Erfanian assumes the role of an archivist as she links images of locations to addresses, and in this current case, of industrial sites. Combing through a history of locations considered once as home and now as sites of industry and manufacturing, Erfanian provokes a definition of time and place. More often than not, however, this definition is tentative, as the depicted imagery of locations is abandoned and vacant. And it is this sense of what once was that best explains the idea of a Vestigium. As a whole, the Vestigium series functions as an archive of place and time. But this archive is essentially false. The juxtaposition of image and text is certainly apparent throughout the work but it carefully relinquishes any sense of linear description or clarification. Rather what surfaces is the possibility of another space, likening the archive to a catalyst in which the identification of place is expanded. More
Text by Christy Thompson
Inkjet prints, still from video
8.5"x11" each (72 prints in total)
Throughout her artistic production, Eshrat Erfanian has examined sites and locations as a space for memory, reconnaissance and projection. These areas operate as holding places, conjuring up aspects of the past that are both personal and distanced. In her recent works, specifically the Vestigium series, the sites and locations are demarcated through a coupling of image and text. Placed either below or beside the image, the text often indicates information such as date, time or location. Through this positioning a relationship is created as the text acts as a corresponding description or clarification of the image. The word Vestigium is derived from the Latin and refers to the mark or trace left from something that has vanished or been lost. In Vestigium II, similar to the miniature paintings of Vestigium I, Erfanian assumes the role of an archivist as she links images of locations to addresses, and in this current case, of industrial sites. Combing through a history of locations considered once as home and now as sites of industry and manufacturing, Erfanian provokes a definition of time and place. More often than not, however, this definition is tentative, as the depicted imagery of locations is abandoned and vacant. And it is this sense of what once was that best explains the idea of a Vestigium. As a whole, the Vestigium series functions as an archive of place and time. But this archive is essentially false. The juxtaposition of image and text is certainly apparent throughout the work but it carefully relinquishes any sense of linear description or clarification. Rather what surfaces is the possibility of another space, likening the archive to a catalyst in which the identification of place is expanded. More
Text by Christy Thompson
