Because the Sky is the Same Sky for Everyone
Artist Book, signed edition of 50, 2017. 18 stunning archival pigment prints housed in a plexiglass slipcase, Prints 11x17" each (book 8.5x11”). Removable rubber-band binding: the structure allows one to view the images as a book or as separate prints. The book doubles as a portfolio of images that can be arranged in any order. Printed with archival pigment inks on archival paper.
In the cover of darkness, beside the woods, garden, and lake, the only light available all summer was from the full moon, appearing an unusual number of times that summer in July and August: a full moon, a harvest moon, and a blue moon. For this series, Marchand delves into her archive to revisit an earlier project of photographs taken at night.
Marchand’s curiosity in photos of the sky – the outtakes of the previous series – was in the language of photography… How a negative is a kind of “ghost image” to its positive twin. When she digitally reversed the photographs to create a negative image, she discovered an altered landscape. The tree line and forest in the positive became a glowing white space in the negative; and where the sky was darkest in the positive - luminous, muted colors appeared in the negative.
The language of photography is rooted in the mirrored relationships of light and dark, negative and positive, reversals and halves. A few years after the death of her mother, by inverting the photographs of the last summer they spent together, Marchand exchanged acknowledged that which was otherwise obscured by darkness. In doing so, she discovered a new reality, a shadow world. The visual language of night blacks and greys converts into a spectrum of hidden color. The resulting images, bathed in different color hues and softness, is not only an exploration of absence and presence, but also a discovery of the possible.
