The Florence Project

This body of work was commission from The Florence Griswold Museum on the occasion of the group exhibition entitled “In Place: Contemporary Photographers Envision a Museum”. I treated the invitation as an artist’s residency that allowed me to reckon with Florence Griswold as a figure, the art colony she facilitated, and the museum that has grown from that legacy. Fusing conceptual practices with image-making and HD video, I researched Florence Griswold and Old Lyme while recording my reflections on Miss Florence’s story and the development of the Museum collections. At the same time, I shot color photographs around town of the Griswold House and the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, sites that hint at the legacy of artists in this area.

Engaging these romantic historical and creative associations, I also considered the ways these memories and artworks have been enshrined in the Museum, which shapes and authorizes how we see them today. Using the early photographic process of Van Dyke brown printing, I reprinted transparencies of paintings and historic photographs from the museum’s archives—creating my version of the Connecticut artworks the museum collects, displays, and interprets by using their accession numbers in the titles of the photographs.

I also created an installation that includes these photographic images along with postcards I wrote throughout the project in a vitrine with archival objects I curated from the collections of the museum and the historic home.

The last component of the project is a video that stands in as an orientation to the Museum, replacing the usual educational video, “Once Upon a Time in Old Lyme: The Story of An American Art Colony.” I drew upon that film’s script and music, as well as on period footage of Florence Griswold shot on 16mm. The images and narratives in “10:20 Girl (After Miss Florence in the Garden, 16mm, ca. 1934; or Wittgenstein’s Mistress)”, draw connections between American Impressionism, the Lyme Art Colony, photographer Walker Evans, and the art collection donated to the Museum by The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, a pioneer in the field of industrial safety during the steamboat era of the mid-nineteenth century. My allusion to Wittgenstein’s Mistress in the film’s title refers to a book I was reading while working on the project—David Markson’s experimental 1988 novel about a woman who believes she is the last person on earth.