Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
By the water at Saint-Louis, at the flat grey hour near dusk, two couples occupy the same photograph without quite sharing it. On the left, against a scarred wooden post, a man in a pale shirt and pleated trousers holds a woman in a checked coat; her arms wrap his waist, her face pressed to his chest, his gaze cast down and inward. On the right, a woman in a soft cardigan and patterned skirt sits on a low wall while a seated man in a waistcoat reaches over to set a felt hat upon her head. The lagoon behind them lies pale and mottled under a rippled sky.
The picture is built on the post, that split trunk rising through the center like a caesura, dividing the frame into two tenses of love. Left is the embrace already deep, wordless, a little sorrowful; right is the flirtation still in progress, the hat a prop in a courtship whose outcome is undecided. Idun-Tawiah lets a single vertical do the work of a whole sentence, and the eye crosses from one couple to the other as from clause to clause, comparing.
It is the gesture of the hat that earns the title and organizes the meaning. A hat placed on another’s head is an old grammar of possession and play, tender and faintly theatrical, and the woman’s upturned smile receives it exactly as offered. Idun-Tawiah, working the vintage register of the Memories Between Earth And Sky series, trusts the descriptive tradition enough to leave the two stories side by side without joining them, confident that their proximity is itself the argument, that the beginning and the middle of an affection can stand within one frame and let the viewer supply the rest.