Lumen Notebook: No Title Required
At Datz Museum Residency in South Korea, July 2019, I asked the all-women-team there who run the residency, museum and press to select books by or with their heroines. I made photograms with the books, on a mountain in the Korean countryside, with the light of the sun.
These photographs are made with traditional black & white darkroom papers. The process, called “lumen printing,” reveals latent colors when exposing the paper to light. The different photo finishes, brands, as well as how long the paper is exposed or how dated the paper, causes it to turn different colors. Lumen Notebook is rooted in the question, “What is a photograph?” and makes a practice of marking time in nature. The temporal, unfixed prints are scanned, making use of older analog and newer digital photographic processes together.
Incidentally, while working on the project, I discovered how much like the tradition of Korean Pojagi some of these pieces are visually. (Pojagi is Korean patchwork in the form of quilts, wrapping papers, food coverings, and early on, coverings for sutras.) I hope these images act as a good luck charm for each of the women at Datz Press and Museum, just like traditional Pojagi do.
No Title Required
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
And won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.
And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.[…]
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is not other than itself, no one else’s but its own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important that what’s not.
View With a Grain of Sand
Wislawa Szymborska
This excerpt, by the Polish Nobel winning poet, is from one of the books selected by Datz director, Sangyon Joo. The ten women who work at Datz brought in an eclectic group of books, reflecting a mixture of ages, interests, and interpretations of my request. Among books selected were, cartoon heroines, a Korean self-help book for women, a mother’s journal, a children’s book gifted from a best-friend, American poets, photographers and activists, Korean novelists and an abstract expressionist Korean painter, a handmade book about best friends, a literary critique of women authors.
A native of Montreal, Amanda Marchand lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001, followed by a Graduate Fellowship Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2002. Marchand is a MacDowell Colony Fellow (Petersborough, NH) and recently completed residencies at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, FL; the Studios at MASS MoCA; and Arteles Creative Center in Finland. Her photographs have been recognized with awards and exhibitions at institutions including San Jose Museum of Art (CA), Datz Museum of Art (Korea), Palo Alto Art Center (Palo Alto, CA), Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe, NM) and The Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO). Central to her practice are limited edition artist books which are in the collections of the J Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), New York Public Library (NY), Stanford University Library, (Palo Alto, CA) and the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University (New Haven, CT).
