Aimee Friberg

Artist Statement:

These photographs are from a series titled The Lost Film Stills. I envision the project as individual photographs that each have their own distinct imagined narratives. In this imaginary world, these images are documents of films, both finished and unfinished, that have been lost or forgotten. The titles of each image reference filmmakers and films that have influenced my vision and are variations on ideas cut or destroyed in the editing process.

 My process of photographing is an exercise in editing the world around me. For me, photographing is akin to curating-- I select vignettes of emotional resonance from experiences I live, and from memories I have stored. By paying attention to light and abstracted forms in the landscape, I translate something beautiful or banal into an opportunity for meditative experience. Light is the subject I set out to capture; an emotional response or investigation into perception is what interests me from the viewer. As in filmmaking, I am influenced greatly by abstraction in painting and historical modern and contemporary space and light artists.The Lost Film Stills are, in essence, abstracted landscapes which function as imagined narratives. The context, which would add meaning or significance to the individual image has been lost or destroyed. What remains is evocation of another story on celluloid, befuddled yet, familiar. This series is an homage to visual artists such as James Turrell and Maria Nordman, and filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Chris Marker--- artist-shamans who shift our awareness of the object to, awareness of an experience, where time is transcendental and memory is collectively acquired and preserved.

Aimee has exhibited and had screenings in various institutions and galleries, including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art,  Museum and Crane- Los Angeles, the University of Washington’s Henry Art and Jacob Lawrence Galleries, the Kitchen Center for Media in New York, the Havana International Film Festival and various galleries in the US and in Mexico. She has curated, judged and presented films for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Havana International Film Festival, the Barcelona Jewish Film Festival and the San Francisco Cinematheque. She lives in Oakland and loves gardening and watching the light change.