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June 24, 2011
Monument to personal memory
Both of Ian Penn’s installations at the VHEC investigate the illuminating nature of fragments.
NINA KRIEGER VANCOUVER HOLOCAUST EDUCATION CENTRE
In an interview with Vancouver-based artist and cardiologist Ian Penn, one of his subjects, a Holocaust survivor, shared a vivid and painful memory: “I went out on my bicycle in a summer dress and a handkerchief in my pocket. That’s all I had. It was the last time I ever saw my parents.” This fragment of experience becomes more than the moment it represents, its poignancy amplified by our knowledge of events that followed. The elusive and illuminating nature of fragments – of memory, of conversation and of imagery – is the focus of Penn’s exhibit, on view at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre from June 30 to Sept. 16.
Projections, one of two installations featured in the exhibit, developed from a series of encounters with elderly women. Penn visited these women, some of them living in nursing homes, in his role as an artist. Yet his identity as a physician no doubt contributed to the trust that developed between them. Penn entered the relationship to create traditional portraiture but was asked by his instructors at Emily Carr University to simply spend time with his subjects, talking and listening – but definitely not painting.
After several months of video-recorded encounters, he began to explore another way to create portraiture. “I sought subjects who had lost agency, through age and infirmity, and were cloistered in their penultimate resting place and I wanted more,” he explained. “Through a process of video-recorded encounters, the women were able to tell their own life stories, reaffirming their personal history and integrity.”
Through their self-protective projections of their memories and life stories, the women became the subjects rather that the objects of their image. “I did not specifically focus on the Holocaust trauma in their lives,” Penn stated, “but, rather, the before and after, the small stories that shaped them.” Themes emerged in these conversations: the fragments’ relation to the whole, the need to create narrative and redemption, and the difficult task of reconstruction after trauma.
Penn created sepia ink drawings on handmade paper from specific moments of these interviews, then used these drawings as the screen for their enlivened histories. According to Penn, “the interplay between the fixed and moving image, elusive and unstable, mirrors the impossibility of creating a ‘truth’ in portraiture and in histories.” The installation of four such dynamic “portraits” within the exhibition space creates two impossible dialogues between women whose common story is never shared.
Whereas Projections interrogates memory and how individuals project their past lives in the present, the companion piece in the exhibit, 20 lbs, deals with the importance of family history, heritage, ritual and remembrance.
“Post-memory,” explained literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, “describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”
In 20 lbs, Penn explores this residual form of memory through the creation of a haunting installation composed of altered family photographs and edited conversations straddling six generations: relatives whose lives were disrupted or destroyed by the Holocaust, the family that he grew up with and the household that he created. Family mythologies, transmitted through photographs and stories, are fragmented and transformed by Penn’s intervention.
The work was created when Penn was an Emily Carr University student in response to an assignment from Sheila Hall, in which he was asked to transform 20 pounds of any object into another object. Raised in an observant Jewish home, Penn chose to work with Shabbat candles. He melted 674 candles onto reproductions of precious family photographs, staining the images that speak to his personal history. The images are mounted onto parchment paper, evocative of skin and Torah scrolls.
Helen Epstein, whose 1979 book Children of the Holocaust has become a classic on the transmission of trauma across generations, commented on the role of photographs in a family marked by the Holocaust. “They were documents, evidence of our part in a history so powerful that whenever I tried to read about it in the books my father gave me or see it in the films he took me to, I could not take it in,” she said.
The indeterminate “it” speaks to the impossibility of comprehending such a cataclysmic event and the role of material fragments in creating a connection to a history characterized by rupture. Penn’s family photographs are imbued with meaning, but their significance remains obscured and subject to interpretation. Although deeply personal, the material incorporated into 20 lbs is evocative; many viewers experience a similar dynamic of familiarity and estrangement, longing and distance, when confronting our own family albums. Penn explores how this is heightened for members of the second and third generations, and beyond.
After premièring at the Emily Carr University graduation show in 2010 and receiving the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver Emerging Artist Award (Visual Arts), Projections was exhibited at Vancouver’s Winsor Gallery. The presentation of this piece and 20 lbs in a Holocaust museum rather than an art setting shifts the meaning of the work, bringing the history it navigates to the fore. At the same time, the presence of this remarkable exhibit within the VHEC alters a space typically reserved for unbroken narrative accounts of the Holocaust. It is Penn’s hope that “displayed in a traditional centre devoted to a specific history, the works address how that history is constructed and reconstructed by each of us that passes through these doors.”
An opening reception will be held at VHEC, Wednesday, June 29, 7-9 p.m. For more information, visit vhec.org.
Nina Krieger is curator/education director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. This article was originally printed in Zachor.
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