Fred Weber, “Forever”, 2020

#somereallygoodones, #fredweber, #daddreams, #8mm,

The relationship between film and dream is hard to articulate. Dreams can play like movies in your head with characters and places and a story with an arc, in color. We may wake and remember bewildering quicksilver flashes or full narratives. Sometimes the dream may seem eventful and relevant of our waking lives.

Life is but a dream

It's what you make it

Always try to give

Don't ever take it

Life has it's music

Life has it's songs of love …

-Raoul J. Cita, “The Harptones”, 1955

Fred Weber has mined a family resource — 8 millimeter home movies — looking for revelation and inspiration, for connections with himself and, as he indicates, his late father. These are his dreams of dad.

As an artist, he jumps through a number of hoops to arrive at his final works. He searches through the family home movie archive, isolates individual frames, prints them, and combines those results into groups he places in the light in the window. He rephotographs that. At the same time, he staggers through his own personal chutes and ladders. The work reflects that. These are moments in his life and, by inference, moments in your life too.

Like dreaming, Weber’s artistic process seems to be guided by his very lively unconscious. His need to make sense of things is evident, but also he takes the viewers to a place where it’s possible to make sense for themselves.

Family histories become changed and reimagined based on how the teller of the tale energizes and shapes the story. There are infinite interpretations of these stories and dreams. When they are shared with us, they become ours too.

Looking at these photographs is pleasurable. The color is soft, with lots of blues, some reds and yellows. The structure within the frame never seems arbitrary but orderly. Weber organizes and arranges visual impulses into little differently sized boxes.

You are able as the viewer to transfer yourself into the action in the frame. Fred Weber, the son, is Howard Weber, the father — Fred is Howard — and you are Fred and Howard and the Mother and so on.

Weber is managing memory, trying to shape it, and artfully, to bring us into it.

The strongest image emotionally is “Forever” with what appears to be a large man hugging someone, a son perhaps. There is another young man watching, next to the camera, sharing the same point of view — who is making these films? — and there is a third figure separated in a frame on the left. The distancing is weighty; the lack of affect is chilling.

“Father Son” is another striking image, an imagined face off in which, surprisingly, the body language is unthreatening and vulnerable.

There is something unique about the way colors meet and overlap so that there are pleasing washes of blues and reds. The artist likes interrupting the whole with horizons. These separations are sometimes lines, and sometimes smeary bands of darker colors, even black.

Aesthetically, in terms of balance and sheer visual pleasure, “Solitaire" and “Acceptance” are probably the best looking, and you could build your chapel with “In Memoriam” as a centerpiece of clouds.

Fred Weber is a wonderful and complicated man who has suffered some trauma. We don’t need the specifics. It is evident that he brings a rich sensibility to his practice. He always manages to bring enormous and joyful energy to life even if he feels as if he is fated to forever clean his personal Augean stables. *1 With “Moments of Your Life” who has committed to decoding his family relationships: Father, Mother and Sister. He looks for answers, and that’s what is here. His image “Theories” may be the most revealing. We see the back of a head — the artist presumably — and a doubling of it above him in a limbo of blue and white with a blush of purple. The artist is literally in his head, confronting these memories.

He notes his Mother’s statement about family photos that “one day I will just be a picture on the wall”.

With all due respect, no, ma’am that is not how family, photographs and memory work. Ultimately, we see them longest in our imaginations.

*1 In classical mythology, Hercules’ sixth labor was the enormous task of cleaning these stables.

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