Moments of Your Life

Dad Dream by W.M. Hunt
Essay for “Moments in Your Life” by Frederic Weber (2020)

Life is but a dream
It’s what you make it
Always try to give
Don’t ever take it
Life has it’s music
Life has it’s songs of love …

— Raoul J. Cita, “The Harptones”, 1955

The relationship between film and dream is hard to articulate. Dreams can play like movies in your head with characters and places and a story with an arc, all in color. We may wake and remember bewildering quicksilver flashes or full narratives. Sometimes the dream may seem eventful and relevant of our waking lives.

Frederic Weber has mined a family resource — 8 millimeter home movies — looking for revelation and inspiration, for connections with himself and, as he indicates, his late father. These are his dreams of dad.

As an artist, he jumps through a number of hoops to realize his instinct and vision. He searches through the family home movie archive, isolates individual frames, makes small paper prints and tapes those to the windows to make them luminous. He re-photographs that at different times of the day.

He likes “using direct and indirect sunlight to light the original film frames and then the paper positives”* thinking of photographers ranging from Fox Talbot and Francis Frith to contemporary Christopher Bucklow.
At the same time, he navigates his own personal Minoan labyrinth. The work reflects that. These are moments in his life and, by inference, moments in your life too.

Like dreaming, Weber’s artistic process seems to be guided by his very lively unconscious. His need to make sense of things is evident, but also he takes the viewers to a place where it’s possible for them to make sense of themselves.

Family histories become changed and reimagined based on how the teller of the tale energizes and shapes the story. There are infinite interpretations of these stories and dreams. When they are shared with us, they become ours too.

Looking at these photographs is pleasurable. The color is soft, with lots of blues, some reds and yellows. The structure within the frame never seems arbitrary but orderly. Weber organizes and arranges visual impulses into differently sized compartments.

As the viewer, you are able to transfer yourself into the action in the frame. Frederic Weber, the son, is Howard Weber, the father — Fred is Howard — and you are Fred and Howard and the Mother and so on.

Weber is managing memory, trying to shape it, and to bring us into it artfully.

The strongest image emotionally is “Forever” with what appears to be a large man hugging someone, a son perhaps. There is another young man watching, next to the camera, sharing the same point of view — who is making these films? — and there is a third figure separated in a frame on the left. The distancing is weighty; the lack of affect is chilling.

“Father Son” is another striking image, an imagined face off in which, surprisingly, the body language is unthreatening and vulnerable.

There is something unique about the way colors meet and overlap so that there are pleasing washes of blues and reds. The artist likes interrupting the space with horizons. These separations are sometimes lines, and sometimes smeary bands of darker colors, even black.

Aesthetically, in terms of balance and sheer visual pleasure, “Solitaire” and “Acceptance” are probably the best looking, and you could build your chapel with “In Memoriam” as a centerpiece of clouds.

Weber is a wonderful and complicated man who has suffered some trauma. We don’t need the specifics. It is evident that he brings a rich sensibility to his practice. He always manages to bring enormous and joyful energy to life even if he feels as if he is fated to forever clean his personal Augean stables. With Moments of Your Life he has committed to decoding his family relationships: Father, Mother and Sister. He looks for answers, and that’s what is here.

His image “Theories” may be the most revealing. We see the back of a head — the artist presumably — and a doubling of it above him in a limbo of blue and white with a blush of purple. The artist is literally in his head, confronting these memories.

He notes his Mother’s statement about family photos that “one day I will just be a picture on the wall”.

With all due respect, no ma’am that is not how family, photographs and memory work. There’s more to it.

correspondence to the writer 08/06/2020.