Annunciation / Relics of Annunciation
by Michelle J. Chun
I am interested in the ways information, fragments, and materials exist, accumulate, and circulate within a community. Through my work, I investigate how visual and material circulation creates cultural imaginations, multi-layered narratives, and collective memories that affirm, connect, negate, or condemn individual experiences. Through excavation of familial archive and historical references, my practice is an assemblage of precarious nostalgia, glass prayers, and treasured fragments from the immigrant’s longings for eschatological belonging—a collected longing that feels ineffable but also on the tip of our tongues.
Annunciation. 2018. 1 1/16 x 1 in.; 1 1/4 x 1 in.; 1 1/16 x 7/8 in. Copper.
Relics of Annunciation (ii). 2018. 5 x 8 in. Intaglio print on paper.
In Annunciation and Relics of Annunciation, I drew inspiration from one of Fra Angelico’s lesser known Annunciations, The Annunciation (1395–1455). It was a piece I passed by every week, like a ritual, while working at the Yale University Art Gallery. At that time, I was working toward a graduate degree in religion, exploring the correlations between the practice of making and looking at paintings and the practice of prayer and contemplation.
Annunciation (ii). 2018. 1 1/16 x 1 in.; 1 1/4 x 1 in.; 1 1/16" x 7/8 in. Copper.
Relics of Annunciation (ii). 2018. 5 x 8 in. Intaglio print on paper.
Making prints in an intaglio studio and spending time with Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, I found myself more interested in the material of the copper plates I was etching on, the process of printing, and the act of intentional fragmentation. There is a quality in the remnants of Fra Angelico’s triptych that is essentially rooted in the materiality and fragmentation of the object as it has endured through time, weather, and exile. Influenced by this vulnerability, I intentionally chose to experiment with copper erosion in an acid bath, and these six copper plates were each shaped by steeping in a self-made acid bath for five days. I used contact paper to create intentional openings and shapes through which the acid could touch the copper, and then I slightly filed the round plates into a circular edge. Like a relic, this copper fragment left a ghost mark as it is treated like a traditional intaglio print, washed and wiped in color, then pressed into a sheet of paper, like the Shroud of Turin. Each plate is no larger than a quarter.
Relics of Annunciation (iii). 2018. 2 x 3 1/2 in. Intaglio print on paper framed in wood.
It is this constant relationship of presence, encounter, distance, and absence that were important for me in both making these copper plates and prints and also in looking at The Annunciation.
Michelle Chun is a visual maker born and raised in Southern California. She approaches her practice both as an embodied meditation on theological concepts and also as a form of investigating the idea of "histories." She received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MAR in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School. She is currently a HATCH resident at the Chicago Arts Coalition and a Teaching Artist in Residence at Lillstreet Art Center. She has shown at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and Gelman Gallery in Rhode Island, among other exhibitions.
