Emidio Puglielli

Halves     5 February – 11 March

more on the artist

Emidio Puglielli’s work Halves is an examination of forgetting. It is an answer he says to the question, “what does forgetting look like”. And it’s a quest that began in his adult years with the discovery that he had forgotten the people and events of his childhood as recorded in a box of family photos. As much as prompting artmaking, that moment of pause proposed an academic inquiry. Begun at RMIT in Melbourne, because he needed to understand his making process, it has since become a PhD.

This quietly poetic work, Halves, speaks, without mediation, of a mood that defies articulation. It is simultaneously known and unknown, as Emidio says “the physical presence of an absence.” His art begins in anonymous photographs found in junk shops that have a single common quality- they were made in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, the years of Emidio’s childhood. They are scanned and reprinted before what we would immediately think of as the subject is surgically removed. Remarkably, rather than cancelling the mood of the photograph it seems to be amplified.  Assembled as a narrative that mood is maintained in a kind of cinematic panorama. In this language of images, mood is triggered by a multitude of known and lived experiences dominated by a nameless presence.

For Emidio this adult dance of half memory is a counterpoint to his adolescent years when as the child of Italian immigrants to Melbourne he yearned of forgetting. It would be an unburdening that would  permit  Emidio the outsider to take on the mantle of an Australian everyman.  

Returning to Italy as an adult he described the experience of many migrants who in returning “home” discover they are again the outsider because “home” like everywhere else has moved on. They are the prisoner of a memory that like the wisps of familiarity clustered at the edges of Emidio’s work Halves is all that remains of the past.

Standing alone looking at Emidio’s seemingly familiar work, I wonder, is this a lament for memories lost, reconciliation with what remains of the past; or, a celebration of language and mood encapsulated in a narrative of our time?

Tony Twigg