Marking an important development in Anna Gaskell’s work, Paint Your Own Pictures will consist solely of films. As an important aspect of her art-making practice for over a decade, Gaskell’s films elaborate on the narratives and themes that inform her photographs. In this selection of new films, Gaskell continues to find inspiration from conjuring up stories about stories, examined through the phenomena of memory. Each film in Paint Your Own Pictures explores the rifts in the subjectivity of perception.

Acting Lessons is an intimate and unsettling glimpse of Gaskell rehearsing a monologue of a complex and personal episode while being directed by an acting coach. The result is a challenge to the artist’s own recollection of and response to her own character’s story. In Vermilion (That’s All I Remember), twins describe the shared experience of the most important day of their lives. The two children agree, contradict one another and even invent new specifics, trying their best to register a similar memory. Although they describe the same event, experienced first-hand, we questions the truth of the event itself due to conflicting witness accounts. For Mirror, Gaskell made a silent film that depicts an ambiguous sequence of events – a girl seen only briefly, pauses then runs off, disappearing into a thick wood. Gaskell showed the silent film to a group of junior-high school students, and a week later recorded the students’ conflicting accounts of their own recollections. In the completed work, the students’ “narration” further complicates our understanding of the film, rather than adding clarity.