Black Gold Framed Print by Barry Ace
Black Gold. Framed direct digital print of acrylic, capacitors, resistors, light-emitting diode and glass beads on handmade paper. 24.1 x 17.8 cm, 2020.
Barry Ace often uses images from digital repositories as a source material upon which to build his compositions for his smaller paper works. Archives, such as the Smithsonian Museum’s, provide scans of daguerreotypes, plates and photographic prints from the era of documenting what was termed “The Vanishing Race” as colonial interests advanced Westward suppressing culture and overtaking Indigenous territory.
The archival image in Black Gold is marred by a dark aberration that migrates from the top to the bottom of the portrait of an Indigenous man. Possibly caused by a scrape in the emulsion on the glass plate negative, for Ace the mark resembles a smear of oil, signifying the expropriation of Indigenous land for fossil fuel, a “premonitory image of things to come.”