With Warmest Regards, Always

Angeline Simon’s photomontage explores fading memories.

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With warmest regards, always – the title of Angeline Simon’s show, on view at Harcourt House in Edmonton until Sept. 11 – comes from a phrase her relatives used to sign their letters, sent back and forth across the world after her mother and uncle emigrated from Malaysia to Canada.

Simon, an emerging artist based in Lethbridge, Alta., and a second-generation Malaysian and German Canadian, sifted through hundreds of family photographs to create two series of collages and another series of shadow boxes, inspired by early German photomontage artists like Hannah Höch and John Heartfield.

Simon’s first series of collages digitally combines enlarged family snapshots with colour photos of Malaysia she took while visiting there. The titles refer to the places she photographed, all with a connection to her family. In these compositions, Simon leaves gaps and obscures faces and bodies with new imagery.

In one work from this series, Kuching II, a family group sits in the foreground, the sepia figures outlined against an acid yellow building pasted into the frame. In Miri, Simon cuts away parts of a man’s body, leaving only his hair, shoulder, hands and part of his arm. The rest of him is an outline filled with a pink, sunlit building.

Standing in front of these digital collages, viewers may scramble to fill in the gaps. There’s a name for this impulse – the law of closure. One of the Gestalt principles of design devised in the 1920s by German psychologists, closure is an imperative to search for patterns and create a unified image out of fractured pieces. Simon plays with removal and erasure – how much is needed for a figure to be recognizable?

She takes this to an extreme in her second series of collages, named after family members. In Khoon Yeam, Simon turns a figure seated on a bicycle into a ghostly smudge. My eyes search for an outline to make sense of the image, but there isn’t one. To achieve this effect, Simon used Photoshop’s content-aware fill function, which allows a user to remove sections of a photograph and fill them in with data taken from the surrounding image. All that’s left of the original figure is a hand perched on one of the bicycle handles. The rest has faded away.

Simon says she played with removing the figure completely but ended up leaving “little glimpses” of the individual, like a hand or a pair of feet. This, she says, anchored her memories to the compositions.

Unlike her collages, Simon’s shadow boxes don’t blur out information. Instead, they juxtapose photos of different colours, sizes and scales from across her family’s history. In one of these shadow boxes, Landscape III, a hand reaches out into space, clutching a smartphone. Look closer and you can see a smiling woman in the phone screen. The hand is taking a picture – engaging in its own meaning-making.

Simon’s work slips between memory and photography. Adam Whitford, a Lethbridge-based curator who organized the exhibition, points to the tension inherent in these compositions. “The photograph is an object that is not supposed to change,” he says. “The opposite of memory.”

Simon’s photomontage conveys the shifting nature of memory. Although her images are grounded in a specific family history, the compositions still feel universal. Everyone can relate to faded memories, or to the holes in family knowledge passed from one generation to the next.

Simon says she hopes viewers will “think about their own sentimental, precious images and memories that they have of loved ones.” ■  

Angeline Simon: with warmest regards, always at Harcourt House in Edmonton from July 30 to Sept. 11, 2021.

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Harcourt House Artist Run Centre

10215 112 Street - 3rd flr, Edmonton, Alberta T5K 1M7

780-426-4180

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