we hold these truths to be . . .

This image is a digital photomontage made for the Axe-neo7 "Ex-Site" exhibition of outdoor site specific artworks.(Axe neo7 is an Artist-run center in Hull, Quebec). The site was the Café aux quatre jeudi patio which has a large movie screen on the side of a building in downtown Hull that is used to project movies on during the summer months. This screen faces the cafe patrons and is visible to the street and to passers by. The screen is about 20 by 14 feet. The image was projected at almost that size once a week during the intermissions throughout most of the summer. Five other artists were invited to use the same screen on a similar schedule on other weeknights. Because the screen size is similar to a billboard I decided to make an image that operated a bit like an advertisement. The viewer could take it or leave it. The static nature of the image allowed people to study the image and assign meaning to it in ways that are different from how they would approach the moving images they usually saw presented there. The picture suggests that some action is desired of the reader ie: save me but the "product" is ambiguous and open to many interpretations. The photographs are nineteenth century cartes de visite. The image held in the woman's hand shows a long dead quadriplegic civil war veteran in a studio. The man's hand holds a picture of a black man with what appears to be sugar cane on his shoulder. The red stripes are positioned as if they were a "comp" that would later be the place where the explanatory text would be placed. The image is an extended set of puns intended to connote diverse readings. The overall shape is like a flag, the predominant colours are red and black, the womans hand is the "distaff" side, the action is in the present but the images proferred refer to memory and the past but their meaning is determined by the present use of them as historical documents. This was the first digital work I produced for exhibition.