Memory Failures

Transience, a type of memory failure, is the degrading of memories with the passing of time. Using vintage images, pixelating parts of their narrative with a checker box censor, challenging memory and replacing with a mosaic of captured recollections.  The overlapping squares act as stand-ins for other memory failures, like bias (distorting a memory), blocking (another memory interferes), misattribution (wrong source), and suggestibility (an overt suggestion), a reflection of our own altered and disappearing memories exposing our mortality.  These patchwork images act as a compilation of memories, an impression that something never happened, like it was dropped into a Orwellian memory hole.  Similar to John Stezaker’s Tabula Rasa series, I have removed the narrative focus of the images, asking the viewer to imagine what lies behind the patchwork quilt collaged on top.  However, my pieces are not cut from vintage film stills, but from found and family photographs that struck me pictorially compelling.