Stan Denniston’s Kent State U./Pilgrimage and Mnemonic was a departure from his previously straightforward presentations of paired photographs. Two complex assemblages of photographs were mounted facing each other on unfinished wall constructions, forming a short, narrow, open-ended corridor which looked arbitrary and utilitarian. The photographic assemblages themselves seemed to be the product of a persistent methodology. On one of the ad hoc walls Denniston had generated a large picture of a site at Kent State University, Ohio, by systematically positioning numerous smaller photographs that he had made at the campus, starting with the ground at his feet and proceeding to record each angle of view until the entire vista had been encompassed. Facing this reconstructed image of the Kent State location was a chaotic mirror image. This was not, however, Kent State; it was a conglomeration of photographs uncannily similar in their corresponding details of a library, street corners, lawns, and a grassy knoll, but taken in Dallas, British Columbia, and Toronto.
The carefully documented Kent State site appeared somehow ahistorical compared to the jumble of found locales which had been photographed not as themselves, but as versions of Kent State. The memory of an event had supplanted their commonplace anonymity; but that event itself was present among them—a small, greenish copy of the famous press photograph of a distraught woman beside a slain student. When the viewer reached a position from which this image could be seen closely enough to be recognized, the sudden snap of a mechanical click was heard, like a gun being cocked or the shutter of a camera.
Denniston did not, however, presume to offer any political or sociopolitical opinion in this complex and subtle work. Matter-of-fact, virtually anti-esthetic methods and materials were held together instead by his obsession with the conjunction of private and public memory. Not only had locations from Denniston’s own past been incorporated into his visualization of this public event; once he had explored the grounds of Kent State itself, any new places he might visit could become reminders of that site and be lost as a memory of their own. This potential for historical events to invade private memory is what evoked an abundance of associations, speculations and ideas more far-flung than the specific trauma of Kent State itself. In a remarkable way, Denniston used photography to embody the workings of the artist’s own memory.
—Jeanne Randolph
