The Moons of Saturn

statement

Frank Rodick, July 2021

Entering my life’s winter years, it’s no surprise that the realities of sickness and mortality should occupy more of my experience. But Covid-19 has intensified these feelings, and for billions of others as well. Life feels fragile, more urgent, and fraught with relentless uncertainty.

To Covid we can add the immediate, daily upheavals of climate change and political unrest. This is a new age of elemental anxiety — global, historical, and intimate.

———

The images I call The Moons of Saturn take birth from witnessing and remembering dimensions of pain and grief endemic as Covid itself. Looking back on my life, I see overlapping thirds: the ordeals of early family life; my years, concurrent with developing my art practice, where I worked as a therapist counselling individuals, many suffering the effects of trauma including sexual abuse; and the latter period right up to now, when I cared for my parents during their decline and slow deaths and for my long-time partner who continues to face the trials of multiple cancers and difficult medical treatments. The pandemic period added two losses: the deaths of my beloved adoptive mother and my closest friend.

Anyone familiar with my work knows I’m no stranger to contemplating pain. Still, this ongoing period has given me more time and space, and a shift in perspective as well, to consider the pain endured by intimates and strangers, sufferings that bewilder and astonish. Some of these people, many, didn’t make it. And, at the risk of sound dramatic — I just don’t know how else to put it — parts of me died with them.

———

However deadening, the energy generated by these meditations are also powerful. Visceral. Drawing from that energy — necessarily engaging rather than controlling it — opened up The Moons of Saturn, a vision of the human condition in extremis. Using a foundation of vernacular photographs — of both intimates and strangers — that anchor the constructed images, each picture from this body of work may be considered an articulation of multiple and overlapping states of being: dissolution, loss, pain, and tragedy. With radically limited tonal range, these images are distillations: decrements comprising a core of disquiet. I offer The Moons of Saturn as a visual disjecta membra of sensation, feeling, and memory — immediate and, in the same breath, past. 

I also see these images as a manifestation of what may be called radical post-memory. Like memories, a photograph is rooted in a past event — in the case of a photograph, a moment — when light, mediated by lens, falls over a photosensitive surface. And memories, we understand now, are anything but static; rather, they change shape over time, immediately even, based on interacting filters such as the biology and experience of the individual memory holder, and contextual factors including the power of social collectives with all their preconceptions, needs, and desires. Analogously, the The Moons of Saturn are reconstructions of vernacular images, filtered through my consciousness, radically transformed to become expressions of my own experience. They are explicit affirmations of acute subjectivity, derived using a medium once celebrated for its supposed objectivity just as memories were once (incorrectly) characterized (and trusted) as straightforward recordings.

Given the indeterminacy and ambiguity inherent to these works (reinforced by the titling), individual viewers can generate their own respective narratives for each picture. Or, perhaps not narratives at all — perhaps, instead, something as fugitive as the memory of a moment or sudden crystallization of a state of being. Again: subjectivity is not only affirmed but rendered acute, encouraging that partnership with the viewer I’ve always considered essential to the experience of art.

This subjectivity segues, without paradox, into the most elemental universality in The Moons of Saturn. The figures and structures in the images appear to be coming apart, disintegrating, at least as much as coming together — like memories, yes, but also as with life itself, on every level. The poet Maria Stepanova says, straightforwardly: “There is no miracle. Everything we see before us, including ourselves, will disappear, and it won’t take long.” What takes place during that moment between eternities may feel momentous, but the ending is as inevitable as it is commonplace. 

The Moons of Saturn will be printed as both archival pigment prints and smaller etchings, in small and strictly limited editions.