The Shade of a Shadow

1989 1991

The Shade of a Shadow | Miriam Fabijan

The Shade of a Shadow

installation: framed oil painting with slide projection as the only light source
1989 – 1991

Engaging with texture, a love for surfaces touching each other, Fabijan guides the audience to a cave where we search for familiarity. The surface of the walls is inscribed upon and broken down in order to build up a bigger picture, a broader view. Whole images only reveal a glimpse.  …There is never a whole story. The artist explores these existing fragments, curious to solve her own mysteries she becomes a detective, but holds the wisdom that understands the impossibility of resolution.

Fabijan finds clues in shadows and ghosts and employs them as presences. Their light acts as a propellent into exploration and questioning. They acknowledge the pain of history, real experiences of displacement, struggling against and within the confines of identity and the conflicts of being. She carries these shadows with her.

There is a moment in “The Shade of a Shadow” where the angel’s hand
overlaps into the light of the mother and touches her heart.
— Helena Goldwater (catalogue excerpt)

The Shade of a Shadow

maquette
1988

source: photo of my mother and brother taken by an anonymous street photographer, Calgary, 1956; plus, the Baptismal gift from my parents (1960) of a guardian angel, which always hung above my childhood bed

The Shade of a Shadow - Lightbox

The Shade of a Shadow

framed light box (detail)
1991

Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper: - ‘I am she!
— Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
“The Other Side of the Mirror” (excerpt)

Day and Night

slide installation: continuous slow dissolve between two images
source: family album, anonymous street photographer, Calgary, c. 1956
1989

That heard me whisper

slides projected onto translucent borco (viewable from both sides),
a continuous dissolve between a positive and negative slide of the
same image creating a daguerreotype effect
source: family album, unknown woman, c. 1954

1989

These works were undertaken with the generous support of the Canada Council and La Ministère de la Culture du Québec.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

1989–91
The Shade of a Shadow.
Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Canada
YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, Canada
Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada

Group EXHIBITION

1988
Basic Sound Radio Show: December 16, 1988. (Miriam Fabijan, I am she.) Halifax, Canada;
Listen

CATALOGUE

1991
Miriam Fabijan, The Shade of a Shadow. Helena Goldwater, author; Joan Stebbins, curator and author. SAAG, Lethbridge, Canada 

ARTICLE

2016    
Straton, Grace. “Hearing Listening,” BASIC SOUND: A BREIF HISTORY, NSCAD, pg. 6–8, 2016

PRESENTATION

1991
Artist Talk. The Shade of a Shadow. Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada

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