Anna Gaskell Erasers 2005
Anna Gaskell’s short video is a meditation on the mercurial nature of memory. In Erasers, a diverse group of young women from a junior high school in New York are filmed recounting the same narrative—a child’s memory of a tragic car accident that kills her mother. This is a true story from the artist’s life, which she told to the girls a week before filming them. Trying to recount this narrative, each of the girls tells the story differently, some use the first person as if it were their own memory, some refer to “you” as if explaining a tragedy to someone who has forgotten the details of his or her own life, and some use the third person, distancing themselves from the event. In their mixed and fragmented accounts, heightened by Gaskell’s deliberate editing, we are reminded of the childhood game of telephone, in which facts and details get lost as each person attempts to reiterate the same thing. Memories of loss can have the same presence, emerging in and out of our conscious minds and shifting over time.
Identification
Title
Erasers
Production Date
2005
Object Number
2005.8
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM’s Collectors Council
Copyright
© Anna Gaskell
https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/2005.8
Copy artwork link
Physical Qualities
Medium
Digital black-and-white video, with sound, 10 min., 35 sec.
Dimensions
Visual Description
Erasers, by Anna Gaskell is a ten-and-a-half-minute long film. It is shown in black and white, and is meant have a documentary-like appearance.
This film is meant to evoke the art of storytelling. The artist told a personal narrative to a collection of young girls, who were then tasked to retell the story back to the artist as she filmed them. The girls are all young adolescents, and are shot head on and close up. Their faces are pale and sharply contrast to the surrounding background, due to the black and white composition of the film. The girls’ face’s sometimes look directly at the camera or off to the side.
The film is edited with different clips of the girls retelling their own recollection of the artist’s story. The different clips are spliced together, with each girl speaking for about ten seconds, before another clip abruptly interrupts and continues. The unifying thread between each of the disjointed video clips is the story each of the girls is telling is originally the same underlying narrative. Using the thread of the original story, the artist stitches together Erasers to show the multiple perspectives and understandings that can arise from the same narrative, much like a visual version of the childhood game “telephone.”
