AMY FRIEND // Dare all Luce
Amy Friend grew up on the outskirts of Windsor, Ontario, Canada where the Detroit River meets Lake St.Clair. She studied at OCADU (Toronto) before embarking on intermittent travels through Europe, Morocco, Cuba, and the United States. Upon her return she continued her studies and received a BFA Honours degree and BEd degree from York University, Toronto and an MFA from the University of Windsor. Currently she teaches Fine Arts at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Friend has exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Galerie Riviere/Faiveley (Paris, France), Cordon/Potts Gallery (San Francisco), Houston Center for Photography, Photoville (Brooklyn, New York) and is participating in several upcoming exhibitions at 555 Gallery (Boston) and in a solo exhibition at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2015).
In 2014 Friend was also selected as one of the top 50 photographs in the juried Critical Mass International Photography Competition.
Her work has been featured in select publications such as: Contemporary Portraits, (Index Book. Barcelona), Creative Block, (Chronicle Books), EyeMazing (Thames and Hudson), Supernatural (&Magazine, Israel), Magenta Flash Forward Emerging Photography Competition (Canada), LENS magazine (China), and The Walrus (Canada).
In my use of the photographic medium, I am not specifically concerned with capturing a “concrete” reality. Instead, I aim to use photography as a medium that offers the possibility of exploring the relationship between what is visible and non-visible. I have been working on the Dare alla Luce series over a period of time; initially I responded to a collection of vintage photographs, retrieved from a variety of sources both personal and anonymous. Through hand-manipulated interventions I altered and subsequently re-photographed the images “re-making” photographs that oscillate between what is present and what is absent. I aim to comment on the fragile quality of the photographic object but also on the equal fragility of our lives, our history. All are lost so easily. By playing with the tools of photography, I “re-use” light by allowing it to shine through the holes in the images. In a somewhat playful and yet, literal manner I return the subject of the photographs back to the light, while simultaneously bringing them forward. The images are permanently altered; they are lost and reborn, hence the title, Dare alla Luce, an Italian term meaning, “to bring to the light”.
The photographs have new meaning, despite the mysteries they harbor. The title of each piece is significant; some titles were taken directly from the notations found written on the photographs, yet those without any indication of provenance were titled to reference the nuances of photography as a medium and the manner in which we interact with these images.
As I continued to work on this series, I became more aware of the weight each photograph carries. They display moments of love, excitement, solitude, tranquility and fragments of stories that will remain unknown.
These photographs are fragments of everything and nothing.
www.amyfriend.ca