Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/19/2022
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Categories
Vaughn Sills: This Precious Life
October 19– December 14, 2022
Opening Reception, Wednesday 19 October, 5:00-7:00pm
Conversation with Artist and Gallery Director, Darrell Matsumoto, 5:30pm
Featuring Vaughn Sills
Picturing a Life of One’s Own
It is with great pleasure we present the work of Vaughn Sills entitled, This Precious Life. This exhibition presents a select retrospective view of the last 40 years of a photographic life.
Sills has owned a long relationship with the camera, given a Brownie as a young girl. In fact, she has resurrected images from family and personal albums, reconfigured as the underpinning of the series Knowing Our Distance (1982-1984). The photograph as memento has long served as historical and emotional trove. Picture albums are memory triggers for familial events. The iconic portrait, place, or activity is immortalized for posterity. We gaze at them, to resurrect the emotions we felt, and may want to feel again. This personal act is exclusively human, thus reflecting a universal experience for all.
The arc of her work is evident in its subject matter, the sense of the sentimental, and discovery. In Beyond Words (1999-2005), she holds softly the remains of animals and other found objects, asking the viewer to consider the wonder of it all. In True Poems Flee (2009-2018) and Inside Outside (2009-2021), Sills returns to photograph her beloved landscape of Prince Edward Island, Canada, clearly a sacred place for her. The land is imbued with personal history and experience. She has a long-established pattern of returning to her childhood home, annually, for familial reunions, then later to establish her own pattern to photograph place as well as her history.
In This Precious Life, Sills is not unlike a poet, who will gather objects and capture images of place and import to reflect on. She is immersed in her life and work, allowing its interweaving to flow continuously, undoubtedly, to configure and reconfigure, picturing a life of her own.
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