Jessica Hoffman: Forever and After @ 110 Church Street Gallery

Dear Mad, I Really Like Your Hair! Love Johnny, hair strands from Jessica Hoffman‘s head in glassine envelopes.

Jessica Hoffman: Forever and After @ 110 Church Street Gallery

Slideshow, vials of shavings from photographic slides the artist found.  Hoffman scraped off bits of each slide, saved the scrapings, then presents the slide show with the bits of image removed.  Each vial is labeled with the trip, location and time period the slides were taken.

Jessica Hoffman: Forever and After @ 110 Church Street Gallery

Talent Show, split screen video footage projected on the wall.

DoN saw this show two weeks ago and has thought about it often as he scooted around town seeing art over the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2011 festival, leaving little time to report.  But Jessica Hoffman‘s show is about memory and the passage of time.  Forever and After incorporates three major narrative elements used in ways that look at the passage of time in abstract even obtuse angles.  “Slideshow is an investigation of memory, using a collection of found slides from the 1960s and 1970s shot throughout Europe and the United States by the same person.  Talent Show is a split screen video piece using footage shot at a school talent show on the left and my own version of the performances on the right.  Dear Mad, I really like your hair today! Love, Johnny is an installation inspired by a box of hundreds of love letters found on the street. – HeavyBubble website”  Each element of the installation recaptures moments in time that are personal, private, secret presenting them in Dada-ist style – should DoN believe that the love letters were found on the street?  Did Jessica really sit and scrape off bits of image from hundreds of slides?  The split screen throw back style to the Woodstock movie era of the video could have been shot over the Summer.  It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, making found objects or finding found objects, then arraying them exquisite corpse style creates a strange narrative as the mind tries to grasp the connections.  At 110 Church Street Gallery, Jessica Hoffman‘s installation, Forever and After, combines sweet nostalgia, contemporary oblique strategies and pure, clean, simple presentation to take the viewer on a time trip back from the future.

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Photos by DoN.