Susan Malmstrom

This work is currently available at Swoon Fine Art in Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia.

Artist’s Statement
For Pictures Within Pictures, a series of ten digital images (pigment ink on paper), new settings were created for vintage found photographs, using every day objects, antique frames, and vegetation from my Nova Scotia garden, in order to explore how old images can be altered when they are removed from their original context and manipulated into a completely different framework.  What does a photographic image from the 1890s, or the 1940s, say to us now?  Our collective memory  disallows looking at an image without bringing some sense of history (personal or collective) to its narrative.  No matter how elaborate or dense the newly created context may be, the photograph within it still retains a layer of elusiveness, as it cannot escape entirely from its own time encapsulation.