Thanks for the Memories

John Vettese sees what develops: Kaitlin Mosley's "Expiration"

by John Vettese

Like family snapshots, memories fade in time.

Exact colors and circumstances, people and places all become a monochromatic wash of foggy nonspecificity as time passes. Photographs are, in a vernacular sense, meant to preserve these moments, and even they are stricken with impermanence.

Kaitlin Mosley embraces that fragility. Her current solo exhibition, "Expiration" (on display at The Light Room's new salon space at 20th and Wallace), is a collection of hazy, dreamlike images shot on chemically expired color film. The aged medium causes some colors to fade and others to shift. It conjures distortion and noise that pops up across the frame. Generally, it makes Mosley's scenes seem on the verge of disappearing into obscurity.

"Ship" depicts a sailboat drifting in a harbor, but both vessel and water are indistinct. Here, the expired film plays with existing conditions — a misty body of water, a purposefully underexposed shot — and compounds them, making the picture translucent and haunting.

Elsewhere, the colors of the old film have blended into a reduced palette. In Chickens, we see a coopside flock digging for seed on a farm, feathers flapping in blurry motion. Everything is no more than a step removed from brown, either in a reddish direction (the animals themselves) or a lighter beige (the grass and trees).

Since Mosley gravitates toward natural surroundings, this range of colors builds only slightly across other images in the show. In Crabbers, a group walking along a marsh with nets and rope is delivered with subtle touches of olive and pastel blue. The woodsy scene of Chevy Van — an old vehicle, abandoned amid trees — adds flecks of parchment yellow to the mix.

The latter image, despite its generally mysterious air, is one of Mosley's more subtle. The expired film caused only slight fading in this case. Placed in the context of the exhibit, it still resonates as a dissolving cognitive artifact; standing alone, it might not connect in the same way. Others still were affected even less by the old film — images of a deer on sand dunes and vegetables at a farm stand (as in Tomatoes) look like they could have been shot digitally, they're so colorfully rich and unworn.

Conversely, the triptych Dune is more dramatically altered by the expired film than any other piece in "Expiration." Mosley — who works a day job as a digital printmaker at Old City's Silicon Gallery Fine Art — printed three shots in a horizontal strip: First we see a woman walking over a sand dune and down a beach. This blends into a frame of a second woman running up to meet her. By the third frame, the two have connected. The aged film saturates the colors — the blue sky becomes soggy, the beige of the sand is burning. It also caused several greenish rings and amorphous shapes, rhythmically repeated vertical smudges and random splotches of white.

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This memory seems on the verge of collapse. And it is an actual memory — many of Mosley's photographs were taken during her large family's annual vacations from Jackson, N.J., to Assateague Island along the Maryland/Virginia coast. Others were taken back home (the van is somewhere in the Pine Barrens), or on a friend's organic farm.

Likewise, the images are recent, despite appearances. The woman in Wendy (pictured) might seem of another era as she navigates a lake, midstroke, in an anachronistic swim cap, but it dates no earlier than 2005.

In a sense, Mosley is using her photographs in that vernacular sense — to preserve fleeting, personal moments. But by hastening their deterioration, she captures them in the way they'll ultimately be: misty and unclear, and yet full of warmth and comfort.

The setting makes these images seem all the more antique. The Light Room's new salon space occupies the spacious living room of a renovated Fairmount brownstone; images hang above the home's mantelpiece and adorn nooks and ornate corners, making one ponder what faded memories the building itself might contain.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

Through July 31, hours by appointment (e-mail awachlin@mac.com), The Light Room Salon Gallery, 2024 Wallace St., lightroom.org.