A HANGING IN THE HOME or The trouble with Dalby is that she knows exactly what she’s looking for; she just doesn’t know where to find it. Thus she actively seeks it out everywhere she goes, finding its relatives in all her activities, in everything she retrieves. The thing itself always eludes her. It’s not that she’s looking in the wrong place. It simply does not wish to be found. Traces are the closest she comes, let’s call them relatives once again, more or less distant. What might be clues perhaps, but moreso signs of life, of the other life she seeks, impregnated into surfaces, scratched or carved out unconsciously, drifting across the streets of cities, caught in the cracks between things. Nevertheless Dalby continues to pick things up, things which have been lost or abandoned or discarded. The things she can’t take, she photographs. She hankers after some kind of Victorian fantasy, which is more about early photographic time than family. It is revealed through her oeuvre to be a fantasy, which persists in the domestic (interior) to this day. The bookshelf, the library, on the sideboard or mantelpiece, or its modern equivalent, the television, in the transformation of the Victorian salon style hanging, into the modern domestic home, walls scattered with family portraits, key moments, shelves, mementos, memorabilia, trinkets; all as much aides memoires as memento mori. What is always missing in the domestic hanging are the explicitly tragic moments, violences and losses, the sad times. For Dalby this sadness is nevertheless also to be found everywhere, implicit in the pathos of the photographic image. To look through the Barthesian lens is to see best what Dalby is getting at. It is this sad loss, rather than a lack, that she sees and which she allows us to see, or to see more clearly. The still life is better put for Dalby in the French; the nature morte. The pathos of living is the steady, inevitable accumulation of loss and sadness; the counterparts to every joy and gain. For Dalby death is a part of life and it too is everywhere found if sought, in the smallest details of a life, in particular in the other, unknown, anonymous life or lost fragment therein.
Annabelle Dalby’s photograph of a boy sat on the edge of a cliff has a seductive familiarity reminiscent of holiday snapshots from the 1960s. Lost in his thoughts it is the picture of nostalgic innocence, of happy and contented days. For many artists what could be better than the freshness of childhood. Innocence after all is a large part of freshness. The unsullied eyes of a child and a brain yet to find cynicism in the world would appear to offer the perfect state. The first moments of infatuation adjust and sometimes mature. The thrill of delight remains a heady drug, one that can occasionally be found through a nostalgic revisiting or the rediscovery of a lost state of revelry, a brief hallucinogenic trip or digital flash-back. These are not critical positions but genuine wishes, a desire to return. …what’s it like to have loved and to lose her touch ABC - All Of My Heart 1982 A Square of Ground Such mythic representations of landscape, evoke a mood or ambience, generic places which can stand for a promised state of being: stereotypical places which have come to represent certain experiences. The individuals staring out to sea in Annabelle Dalby’s Places of Exposure (1999), look like they have been caught in a moment of personal reverie. Their blurred, soft toned colours are reminiscent of a 1960’s family holiday snap-shot. Every photograph’s a fallacy, an assemblage of many stories. Dalby’s photographs are both ‘found’ as well as staged and without knowing there’s no way of differentiating between the two. |