"Frozen Moments" originated in 1975 as an artist's book edition entitled "Afterimages" produced while I was an undergraduate at VCU in Richmond, Virginia. The original piece consisted of twelve hand letter-press actions/titles and ten photo offsets from xeroxed photos of Sony video porta-pak freeze frames. The edition was printed as a multiple of 15 & loosely bound in a custom designed, hand-made grey portfolio. Distribution was to the artist's Mail Art list. I have reworked the original piece (in 1996) for presentation on the web2.
Influences at the time included FLUXUS, DUCHAMP, I CHING, LAURENCE WEINER, GEORGE BRECHT, ANDY WARHOL, VITO ACCONCI and others who saw the need to focus aesthetic attention on the day-to-day ephemera of our lives. The all-too-often overlooked magical Theatre of the Mundane. Special thanks to my mentor at that time, Davi Det Hompson1.
The Frozen Moments are each a transient still life, complete with implied narrrative and imbued with personal intention. But as with many things in life which may contain an important message, the channel is often noisy. Too much static to discern the content. McLuhan's "Medium is the Message" is transformed into an archetypal conflict of signal-to-noise with Buddhist overtones: layer after layer of media mutilates the original message, resulting in indecipherable epiphenomena onto which we unwittingly project our own cultural bias and ego justification in the everyday act of uncovering meaning...
We are how we see.
Mark Gilliland, NYC & Rensselaerville, NY.1996
1 Since originally constructing this web version of Frozen Moments and posting the descriptive text (above), I have learned the sad news that Davi Det Hompson passed away late in 1996. This piece is dedicated to his memory and in the spirit of his vision of art as a freely shared gift.
2 This piece was moved from the original site/host to my ImageMaya.org site during Sept 2005. Minor editing to fix URL references and footer navigation was done. However, the content remained essentially unchanged from the original posting in 1996.
Update January 2021 - I have had to modify the underlying HTML for this piece once again, this time to fix how media (audio) was being handled - due to changes in web technology over the years. In that process, I also decided to modify the navigation within the project as a whole to provide a cleaner visual interafce. Minor text edits have also occurred here and there. Please enjoy!
Free free to email me.
Click on animated title to return to Frozen Moments selection page.
Click pause/play to start page audio on mobile devices.
