Jeri Coppola
Artist Statement
Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. -Rachel Carson
In my experience, things tend to happen just when you are looking away. Our ideas tend to slip from our grasp, ruling over us by hiding in the images and things that surround us.
-Ernst Fischer
Remembering is like constructing and then traveling again through a space. We are already talking about architecture. Memories are built as a city is built.
- Umberto Eco
My work investigates the gap between the internal landscape of memory and the external world around all of us. Landscapes become a metaphor for memory and are a trigger to set the story into motion. Place can hold memories that are at once personal, and at the same time universal. The flow between real and imagined becomes blurred and travels between narrative and dream state. The intersection of image and text can make up a narrative which is sometimes in sync, sometimes not. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye and then when you go back later and it either it is very different from what you thought or not there at all. I am not so interested in the new image, but I am very interested in drawing your attention to see something that could have always been there but unnoticed. That familiar alley suddenly captures your eye, foreign becomes familiar, like when you travel to an unfamiliar landscape and it seems like you have been there before. This moment between the known and the unknown, is what I am searching for in my work.
And then the light shifts, and it all fades into the background. Back to what it always was. To enter a new space, often you must trespass before you are welcomed in. Sometimes there is a hint of nightmare or discomfort. I am as interested in loss of memory and forgetting as I am in memory.
I will often return to the same landscapes of Cape Breton, NS, Iceland, and the New Jersey Turnpike, both industrial and natural, using a language that relates to time and space inviting the viewer to become part of a recollection. The final piece can be photographs, xeroxes, projections or lightboxes. The combination of images and different materials chosen is as important as the imagery itself. The works are often constructed of smaller parts, in an attempt to invoke the layered strata of remembering, pieced together with intentionally visible seams so the viewer is given an exposed reconstruction of space and time, as one does in recollection.
Selective, reconstructed, supplanted, ancesteral and physical memory are all stored in the body (in the brain, the muscles, the synapses.) The internal space of memory bridges the external world around us. Landscape becomes a metaphor for memory and then sets the story into motion. I am the voice-over of my work, seemingly absent, but you know my intentions. You may not know the story, but there seems to be one. The flow between real and imagined becomes blurred and travels back and forth between then and now. What is left out is often as important as what is said. Specific gestures and places hold memories that are personal but at the same time universal.
My fascination with memory is not only with its power over emotion, but also with its inherent flaws. Memory is without objectivity or stasis and yet we continually try to hold it accountable to truth. We are loyal to it and it delivers us to familiar ground. By using photographs, slides, text-based installations and sculptures, I work to bridge the permeable, internal landscape of memory to the external landscape around us to create a map of a series of correlations between thought and the physical world.
Artist Statement
Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. -Rachel Carson
In my experience, things tend to happen just when you are looking away. Our ideas tend to slip from our grasp, ruling over us by hiding in the images and things that surround us.
-Ernst Fischer
Remembering is like constructing and then traveling again through a space. We are already talking about architecture. Memories are built as a city is built.
- Umberto Eco
My work investigates the gap between the internal landscape of memory and the external world around all of us. Landscapes become a metaphor for memory and are a trigger to set the story into motion. Place can hold memories that are at once personal, and at the same time universal. The flow between real and imagined becomes blurred and travels between narrative and dream state. The intersection of image and text can make up a narrative which is sometimes in sync, sometimes not. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye and then when you go back later and it either it is very different from what you thought or not there at all. I am not so interested in the new image, but I am very interested in drawing your attention to see something that could have always been there but unnoticed. That familiar alley suddenly captures your eye, foreign becomes familiar, like when you travel to an unfamiliar landscape and it seems like you have been there before. This moment between the known and the unknown, is what I am searching for in my work.
And then the light shifts, and it all fades into the background. Back to what it always was. To enter a new space, often you must trespass before you are welcomed in. Sometimes there is a hint of nightmare or discomfort. I am as interested in loss of memory and forgetting as I am in memory.
I will often return to the same landscapes of Cape Breton, NS, Iceland, and the New Jersey Turnpike, both industrial and natural, using a language that relates to time and space inviting the viewer to become part of a recollection. The final piece can be photographs, xeroxes, projections or lightboxes. The combination of images and different materials chosen is as important as the imagery itself. The works are often constructed of smaller parts, in an attempt to invoke the layered strata of remembering, pieced together with intentionally visible seams so the viewer is given an exposed reconstruction of space and time, as one does in recollection.
Selective, reconstructed, supplanted, ancesteral and physical memory are all stored in the body (in the brain, the muscles, the synapses.) The internal space of memory bridges the external world around us. Landscape becomes a metaphor for memory and then sets the story into motion. I am the voice-over of my work, seemingly absent, but you know my intentions. You may not know the story, but there seems to be one. The flow between real and imagined becomes blurred and travels back and forth between then and now. What is left out is often as important as what is said. Specific gestures and places hold memories that are personal but at the same time universal.
My fascination with memory is not only with its power over emotion, but also with its inherent flaws. Memory is without objectivity or stasis and yet we continually try to hold it accountable to truth. We are loyal to it and it delivers us to familiar ground. By using photographs, slides, text-based installations and sculptures, I work to bridge the permeable, internal landscape of memory to the external landscape around us to create a map of a series of correlations between thought and the physical world.
