Dani McKenzie Artist Statement:

There is something faintly sinister about old photographs. The people in them are

perfectly still, their expressions preserved long after everything else about them

has disappeared. Photography has a way of making the living look dead, and the

dead look as though they’re waiting for something.

Six Portraits began with photographs of strangers, found while sifting through the

clutter of a Parisian flea market. Charcoal is already a medium of ghosts, with

images smudged, rubbed away or built up from darkness. Translating these

photographs into drawing seemed an appropriate way to bring their subjects back,

if only provisionally.

There is something faintly absurd about reconstructing portraits of people I will

never know, attempting to make contact with a past that has already flattened their

lives into images. Whatever is left of these people belongs partly to the

photograph, partly to the drawing, and partly to the imagination of whoever

happens to be looking.

Perhaps it’s an exercise in projection more than recovery. I can inspect their faces,

speculate about their lives, invent histories from a handful of clues. But whatever

intimacy the drawings might suggest is largely an illusion. Their histories remain

stubbornly out of reach; whatever I imagine about them says as much about me as

it does about them.

The past is very good at impersonating the present. It is less forthcoming about

the details.