The McMaster Museum of Art is delighted to announce the acquisition of two works by Canadian artist Sara Angelucci ― Regular 8 (Allan Gardens) and Regular 8 (Gairloch Garden), Chromogenic prints from 2009. The photographic works, identified as having outstanding significance and national importance by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, were generously donated by the artist.

Sara Angelucci is a Toronto-based artist (born in Hamilton, 1962) who works primarily with photography, video and audio. As one reviewer put it, “Sara Angelucci has always worked at the intersection of photography and memory.” Her work explores the vernacular imagery of home movies and snap-shots and their limited ability to convey the exact sense of a lived experience.

The Regular 8 series, including both gifted works, was displayed at the Museum last summer in the touring exhibition Flowers and Photography. In writing about the series in the exhibition catalogue, Angelucci explained:

“Regular 8 examines 8 mm film-making in the mid to late 1950s, a medium held in the hands of amateurs primarily documenting family life: special occasions, vacations and simple daily moments… The stills in Regular 8 present us with a freeze-frame, rupturing and suspending the unfolding of the narrative at a specific moment. The white “holes” appearing over the images make reference to Kodak’s tagging system, a series of numbers punched through the end of each film reel during the manufacturing process to identify the film stock and batch number.”

“Suspending these moments gives us pause to consider many things; stories and people who are long forgotten; the invention of the image of the happy family within the staging of films; a time and technology which have passed; and transcended cultural values.”