Journal Reading Performance, The Other Gallery, Banff Centre Alberta, March 21, 2009

This performance and installation explores concepts of distance in identity over time. One’s handwriting is generally recognized as unique to that person. However, the artist struggled during her Journal Reading Performance to read her writing and subject matter from forty years ago, experiencing first-hand the phenomena of the fluidity of identity.
The context for the Journal Reading Performance is a self-directed residency in photography at the Banff Centre and a solo exhibition at The Other Gallery. The artist was completing the Ecology of Narrative Space series, which had montaged her handwritten journals into her 1981 Arctic community landscape film photography.
The Performance installation included a utilitarian chair and desk with an open journal book on the desk. Beside this was a monitor on a stand facing the same direction as the chair from which the artist read. A video camera fed to the monitor its recording of only the artist’s hand gestures hovering over the open pages of her journal and her stumbling voice extemporaneously reading her hand-written journal aloud for the first time in forty years. The combined effect was of a disembodied voice that had once been the artist’s personal daily journal note-taking.