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Fading Out and the All-Seeing Goddess

Kodak’s commercial slogan during the 1950s was: “For sparkling pictures big as life.”  .

The 35 mm slide transparency is a hybrid medium on a continuum between still photography and motion-picture film. A slide is a high-resolution positive photograph, an accurate color reproduction. A 35 mm slide can be magnified by a factor of 100 (to 3,500 mm) and still maintain a crisp and detailed projected image.
 
In “Fading Out” 35mm slides, once ubiquitous in an analog world, are used as fodder for art. This installation was created from an assemblage of thousands of slides once used to document the artist’s work, capture family and friends, record travel adventures, and serve as reference material for performance art. These cardboard and acetate squares are strung together to create curtains of light and color. The viewer is invited to intimately scrutinize these tiny images--magnifiers are provided for viewing if desired.
 
The space becomes a theatrical set inviting the viewer to create their own narrative or simply visit a bygone era. A large figure commands the floor and seems to dance disco style swaying her long arms studded with copper and glass eyes. She towers above most men, wearing a brightly lit crown of slides and glass eyes. The centrality of “seeing” is made evident--a slide viewer serves as her strongest facial feature. She is garbed in more slides and a generous mesh skirt adorned with mirrors and glass eyes sewn in the round. She is named “The All-Seeing Goddess”.

In a digital world 35mm transparencies have been rendered obsolete, unnecessarily. The artist ceremonially summons aspects of life in the mid-1980’s and 1990’s.

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