A Daily Record : installations by Gisele Amantea
including a short video work: in your dreams
18 Feb to 11 March 06 2 - 7 pm daily
Seagull Arts & Media Resource Centre
36c s p mukherjee road, cal 25,
ph 24556942/43

A Daily Record was inspired by a series of notebooks kept by Emma Luciantonio, who lived in Sarnia, an industrial city in southern Ontario (Canada). Unknown to her husband, an hourly wage worker, and her children until they were discovered after her death in 2002, the notebooks are extraorindarily meticulous and obsessive. They consist of columns of individual entries extended over literally hundreds of pages that carefully list all aspects of her day-to-day life. Incredible in their detail – the birth of her grandchild or a mammogram are listed with washing the floor – the breadth of her life is represented by her ongoing, habitual entries.

The beauty of the hand-written page, including the crossing out of duties and events, is moving and strongly connotes labour conducive to a woman of her age, social class and cultural circumstances in Canada. The frugal economy governing a life of tight financial circumstances extends even to the notebooks she used, which include unused parts of her children’s school exercise books, scratchpads given away for promotional purposes by businesses and organizations and the like. The density of these notebooks and the consistency of Mrs. Luciantonio’s actions form a complex narrative that evokes a compelling and what I believe is an important history. My interest in making this work has been twofold: to create an immersive and highly detailed sense of space referencing containment and intimacy so evocative of the experience of the notebooks and to make a private, seemingly insignificant life known in the public realm and insert it into a history of art.

Pages of the notebooks and their covers have been scanned, digitized and output in a number of formats, sizes and sequences. The large-scale prints as well as those that have been framed are inkjet prints. The pages of the annual calendar diary in the large gallery are laser prints.

I would like to thank my friend Sandra Luciantonio who brought her mother’s notebooks to my attention and supported my interest in making A Daily Record. The original pages were scanned and digitally edited for output by Joanne Hui, Emily Manenthal and Logan MacDonald. The work was printed by Sagamie Centre, Alma, Québec. Presenting work in Kolkata is something I have looked forward to for a number of years. I am pleased to thank Naveen Kishore and the Seagull Foundation for the Arts for making it possible. My thanks are extended as well to the many members of the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre with whom I have worked in the organization and presentation of the exhibition. Financial assistance for the production of A Daily Record was provided by a grant from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montréal. Conseil des arts et des letters du Québec supported travel and transport expenses.

Gisele Amantea

Gisele Amantea is an artist who lives in Montréal, Canada. Her work is known for its innovative use of materials and formats drawn from popular culture, such as flock, graphic narrative and commercial film, and its exploration of questions related to women, class, nostalgia, history and memory. Materially and visually rich, her work also considers notions of ornament and decoration in relation to domestic architectural space. In 2002 she participated in the Khoj International Artists Workshop in Mysore. Recently she has completed a large-scale public art commission for the City of Vancouver and, as a member of Cut Rate Artists’ Collective, co-curated a major exhibition titled Used/Goods sited in Montreal’s main Salvation Army store. She has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally and her work is included in numerous public and private collections in Canada. Since 1995 she has been a faculty member in the Studio Arts Program in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. She currently teaches interdisciplinary approaches to artmaking and in the graduate program in Fibres.