Seeking Grace

Double Take explores the memory of identical twins whom together experienced a traumatic childhood event. Using juxtaposed images and concurrent storylines, the viewer is challenged to examine the similarities and differences of the twin’s tales. As the image of the twins present us with a literal double take, their parallel stories take us even further into the recesses and disparities of human memory.

Uses the final fragments of home movies to create a series of "endings," each one being obliterated by the white dots that appear at the end of each filmstrip.

For many years a long photograph featuring 60 women in western style costumes has hung in the hallway at the entrance of Sara Angelucci’s house. The picture was given to her husband by his Aunt Dagmar. They knew little about it, other than Dagmar had cut the costumes the women were wearing when she worked at Malabar, Toronto’s renowned costume house. Angelucci often wondered who the women were, how the photograph was taken, and what it meant to Dagmar (who died in 2011). "Cirkut/Canadettes" unpacks the many layers of this photograph, personal, local/social, and technological history. Through archival research Angelucci not only discovers who the women are, but opens up a window into the time the image was taken, Toronto in 1956. Interwoven with her own reflections, her voiceover narrative draws from articles and quotes of the time, giving voice to attitudes of the period, and the desire and mysteries that photographs hold.

The video offers a nocturnal glimpse of Shanghai street life, depicting one of the typical neighbourhoods disappearing under the city’s urban development. The improvised sound track is a duet orchestrated for the ancient Chinese instrument the guzheng1 and for the cricket that sings only at night.

In A Hundred examines the experience of time; both as an ongoing linear progression, as well as a circular pattern of remembered fragments. The work puts forward the notion that "real" time encompasses both; one seemingly measured and mathematical, the other incalculable and personal. It is in the fragmented past of memory that the work places its sympathy. As time moves on the mind gathers an ever increasing bank of stored moments. The place of memory can at times be haunting, but it is also the only place where loss can be momentarily appease.

This video addresses the complex and rich cultural history inherited by the children of immigrants. While official History is often presented as a single truth, "truth" is multi-layered and multi-valent. Through a layering of stories from Italian immigrants, images from Super 8 family films, and remembrances of my grandmother, "America il Paradiso" seeks to express the complexity of history.