On Friday, November 22, 2002, FLATFILEphotographyGALLERY will open its last show of 2002 entitled Memoire/Reve (memory/dream) with a reception from 6-9pm. The show will feature the work of gallery artists Norah Diedrich Delaney and Beth Moon, and guest artists Jennifer Mannebach and Julia Hrivnak in the main gallery, an installation by gallery artist Martin Brief and guest artist Gagik Aroutiunian in the project room, and various other guest and gallery artists work in Gallery II, including platinum prints by Ann Dahlgren and Douglas Foulke from their book A Fairy's Child, recently published by Harry N. Abrams. (Autographed copies of the book will be available for purchase at FLATFILE).

Memoire/Reve regards the past and the dreaming present, which exists in a state of timelessness - being neither now nor then. The images in the show are distilled into a visual essence of collective memory. There is a
strong sense of identification with the imagery in the pieces which forms a
cohesive body of work, although it has been created by a variety of artists.

The work of Norah Diedrich Delaney creates a kind of cinematic view of events and people that exist in her family photographs. The resulting diptychs transport one to another world; to a period that is recent enough to evoke the black and white movies of the fifties, and thereby command recognition and a sense of personal history.

Beth Moon, on the other hand, takes us farther back, to an England reminiscent of A Secret Garden and The Little Princess, where young boys don blazers, short pants and knee-high socks for years in boarding schools, living in a world of solitary privilege.

Moon's spectacular large scale platinum prints dip into a Ninteenth Century world created through a Nineteenth Century process. Jennifer Mannebach, who has been a FLATFILE guest artist in the past, has once again created pieces that collage textures and snippets from all our lives into a patchwork of memory.

There is no viewer that will not recognize some fragment of his or her own life among the many scraps that make up Mannebach's large work. She collages, photographs the result, enlarges it, and finally overpaints it to create pieces that are as layered as their meanings.

Julia Hrivnak's lush and multi-layered prints pair mortuary and crime photos with family photogaphs to create eerie combinations of love and violence that both draw and repulse the viewer. The crime scene sensibility that underlies turn-of-the-last-century family photographs is both beautiful and terrifying, making this body of work both the belle et bÃte of this show.

In the project room, Martin Brief's vastly enlarged, family photographs again draw the viewer into a dialog with his or her own family history. A newly married husband and wife kiss in a car, an older brother helps feed a baby sister - memories that are easy to call our own. There is, as in Delaney's work, that sense of home movies from the not-too-distant past. Their distressed appearance is reminiscent of snapshots cracked and worn from existing within the confines of a wallet.

Gagik Aroutiunian, who is a performance and installation artist, has created his pieces from metal, other mixed materials, and water in which photographs symbolically float. The images appear to be fading away in the water, and yet, since the development and printing of photographs involves water, seeing them there seems natural. Due to the scientific apparatus-like appearance of the pieces, one believes that they could be machinery for either saving or eradicating memories.