Jeri Coppola: Notes on Stills for a Film Not Made
The artist Jeri Coppola has created a diverse body of work investigating the gap between the internal landscape of memory and the external one around us. In her words, “Landscapes become metaphors for meditation and trigger the story into motion, confusing the border between real and imagined. Memory often distorts our images.”
Exploring the relationship between memory and the corporeal body, Coppola’s work traverses psychological and physical dimensions, and Notes on Stills for a Film Not Made engages with the viewer through paired images – sometimes obscured, almost always lacking predetermined reference – and forges experiential bonds that evolve slowly over repeated readings. Exhibitions of photos from the extended, non-ending, series that makes up Notes on Stills for a Film Not Made have been held internationally. This publication is the artist’s first.
From the afterword: “This project began a few years ago: the photos are from different places, different times and different cameras. As it continues to evolve, I look through old images, take new ones, crop images. Along the way, I realized that a random approach to arranging them was the way to go. Each of these photos is meant to be seen next to another, and in that way they become a sentence that forms non-narrative narrative, and that then becomes more than the single image. Each time the work has been exhibited, the curator has chosen from a larger group of photos, and then arranges an order. The series Stills For a Film Not Made (from which this book emerged) is an ongoing, ever changing project.
“The book is one version, arranged by me by selecting a group of images and letting them fall by chance. I kept pairs that worked and rearranged those that didn't. Like shuffling cards, the images found their own order.”
