The artist Jeri Coppola has created a diverse body of work investigating the gap between the internal landscape of memory and the external one around us. In her words, “Landscapes become metaphors for meditation and trigger the story into motion, confusing the border between real and imagined. Memory often distorts our images.”

Exploring the relationship between memory and the corporeal body, Coppola’s work traverses psychological and physical dimensions, and Notes on Stills for a Film Not Made engages with the viewer through paired images – sometimes obscured, almost always lacking predetermined reference – and forges experiential bonds that evolve slowly over repeated readings. Exhibitions of photos from the extended, non-ending, series that makes up Notes on Stills for a Film Not Made have been held internationally. This publication is the artist’s first.

From the afterword: “This project began a few years ago: the photos are from different places, different times and different cameras. As it continues to evolve, I look through old images, take new ones, crop images. Along the way, I realized that a random approach to arranging them was the way to go. Each of these photos is meant to be seen next to another, and in that way they become a sentence that forms non-narrative narrative, and that then becomes more than the single image. Each time the work has been exhibited, the curator has chosen from a larger group of photos, and then arranges an order. The series Stills For a Film Not Made (from which this book emerged) is an ongoing, ever changing project.

“The book is one version, arranged by me by selecting a group of images and letting them fall by chance. I kept pairs that worked and rearranged those that didn't. Like shuffling cards, the images found their own order.”

First trade edition of 100 copies from an open edition. Issued simultaneously with a handmade artist’s edition of 50 copies: 30 artist’s books, 10 with an additional suite of prints, and 10 AP.

Also available in hand-made artist’s editions. Find them here.

8.5 x 11 inches

36 pages with covers. 32 photos.

Softcover

Published 19 July 2021

ISBN 978-1-7375743-0-9

Jeri Coppola: website

Artist’s statement:

In my experience, things tend to happen just when you are looking away. Our ideas tend to slip from our grasp, ruling over us by hiding in the images and things that surround us. -Ernst Fischer

I am not so interested in the new image, but I am very interested in drawing your attention to see something that is "always there" but unnoticed. That familiar alley suddenly captures your eye, and then the light shifts, and it goes back into the background. Back to what it always was. I want that moment.

The internal space of memory bridges the external world around us. My landscapes become a metaphor for memory and sets the story into motion. I am the voice-over of my work, seemingly absent, but you know my intentions. We don’t know the story, but there seems to be one. The flow between real and imagined becomes blurred and travels between narrative and dream state. Often there is a hint of nightmare or discomfort, and I am as interested in loss of memory as I am in remembering. What is left out is often as important as what is said. Specific gestures and places hold memories that are personal but at the same time universal.

I use different mediums and materials, and there is always some aspect of the photograph in my work, even if the image gets dropped at the end. I often make lightboxes that range from traditional square or rectangular shapes to using the body as a more sculptural form of what a lightbox can be.