Chosen for the layers of meaning this painting may hold—and for its ability to swallow someone standing in front of it—Weight was a part of this year’s Long-Distance Love program. Long-Distance Love, a virtual program offered annually at Krannert Art Museum in collaboration with the New American Welcome Center, is a series of tours anchored in artworks from our collection. The tours invite considerations of the labor, the joy, and the anguish of loving each other across great distances and time.
Annette Lemieux has worked in many mediums, including photography, sculpture, and painting. In this work, we experience a split image frozen in a sort of grainy limbo.
I asked four of my closest long-distance loves to weigh in on interpreting this image.
The image below looks like the memory of a place. The black is visually heavy, slowly inching down, permanently erasing this memory. Time is running out.
The pigeon feeder is engaged in a compassionate act of love; there is no expectation that the love is returned.
The frame is absolutely still; there is a dilemma on how to move forward.
I’m thinking of pigeons being the carriers of messages and someone sitting on a bench and feeding them—are these messages for someone who is somewhere else?
(Shamira Dharap, Jayant Dharap, Sujata Dharap, Shantanu Pai)
The black mass at the top registers as a thick, viscous absence. The person standing in the image below gives very little away about who they are, owing to the artist’s use of a found photograph as her source material. The concrete structures in the background—perhaps the feet of buildings—and the way the rock pigeons flock there is at once intimate and isolating. Maybe this is what it feels like to live—and love—alone in a city.
To me, Lemieux makes absence conspicuous, articulating it in a way that forces me to consider its weight and bring it into the foreground. What is made available to us—as information, as material, as memory—when what is absent takes conspicuous shape?
Author: Ishita Dharap, Education Coordinator
