GILDA DAVIDIAN

Secondhand Witness - Room 2
Secondhand Witness - Room 4
Chromogenic Prints
24” x 36”
2015

Among the themes present in the Contemporary Collection is the role of art in remembering personal or social experience. Gilda Davidian’s conceptual photographs engage in the act of remembering by combining two very different types of images. On the one hand, Davidian uses found slides from her family’s personal archive, recollections of visiting and fleeing Armenia and Lebanon. Davidian juxtaposes these with empty, unremarkable apartment rooms - perhaps similar to an immigrant's first home in Glendale. By using old school slide projection in unlit rooms, the projector screen glows and morphs into a sort of window or portal, connecting the present to an only-imagined past.

The Contemporary Collection contains two of Davidian’s images, each with opposing effect. One is of a natural scene of mountains in Armenia, though her brother/photographer can’t remember where or when it was taken. The other is from a roll of film shot on the last day in Lebanon before fleeing - one last glimpse as the past recedes.