OUR: fragmented memory​​​​​​​

Our memory is like a child walking through a candy store. You can never tell what bright, colorful piece of candy she will pick out to take home and treasure. In the same way, some moments in are memory shine brighter than others. The more distant we are from an event, the less accurate our memory is of the event. We reconstruct the moment with our imagination using the vivid details of the moments. As Tennessee Williams said in The Glass Menagerie, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” As we lose grasp of these details, we fill in the gaps in our memory.

Throughout this body of work I use a technique of fragmenting photographs to mimic our memories. It is a playful interaction focusing on family snapshots and the memories of the collective experiences. I use found family photographs containing a nostalgic vernacular lexicon that connects each person’s personal experience to reference ordinary American life. I alter the opacity of certain fragments to make them more transparent to illustrate how the general details of memories fade. Often the most vivid details are in the forefront of our mind, and this is illustrated in the way that I layer the more opaque fragments in the foreground of the image.

Collective experiences are interactive, perhaps even subconsciously. We appropriate details from other’s memories and stories of shared experiences and re-appropriate bits and pieces to form our own memories. We gather those bits and pieces from the same shared moments like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle box to complete the picture of our memory.