For this series, Marchand revisited an earlier project of photographs taken at night, in complete darkness, with varying exposure times. The only light available was from the full moon, which appeared an unusual number of times over the course of that summer: a full moon, a harvest moon, and a blue moon. In all the pictures of the sky, the moon appeared, looming large.
Her interest in the photos of the sky – the outtakes of the previous series – came when she reversed them to create a negative image. The tree line and forest in the positive became a glowing white space in the negative; and where the sky was darkest in the positive, luminous, muted colors appeared in the negative.
The language of photography is rooted in the mirrored relationships of light and dark, negative and positive, reversals and halves. By inverting her photographs, Marchand exchanged night for day and acknowledged that which was otherwise obscured by darkness. In doing so, she discovered a new reality, a shadow world. The resulting images, bathed in color and softness, is not only an exploration of absence and presence but also a discovery of the possible within the impossible.
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).
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Amanda Marchand: Because the Sky is the Same Sky for Everyone, 2017
Edition of 50
$950
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