Contemporary cultural narratives speak to our common aspirations, fears, and perplexities. Ritually retold, these stories reinforce a constructed history and sustained narrative that we collectively buy into. There is no truth to search for, but an illusion to deconstruct. The Cartesian gap between desire, the locus of memory and reality reveals how the act of archiving is a result of the societal impulse to preserve the past and cement a coherent collective memory hinged on imagery.
Interested in the absence of destiny and physical products of perception, this body of work explores the mythology of a fictional past and the anonymity of cultural narratives, how objects wear time, details inevitably becomes mysterious and banality acquires an aura through its universality. Collapsing multiple histories and narratives within a singular frame or iteration, the imagery endeavors to undermine the positivist discourse and mnemonic pretext of the photographic medium.
Although no object is counted on more for it mnemonic technology, a photograph is not inhabited by memory, but rather produces it. A fugitive testimony to a moment lost, the image painted by light counterfeits an instance. The mutability of our understanding of history unveils the role imagination and photographs plays in remembering. The hundredth-of-a-second captured has infinite readings — the poetry of the enclosure met with the prosaic phenomenon of the minds’ need to create meaning. The complexities of this dichotomy underpin the mediums precarious relationship with reality, shedding light on its complicit relationship to the truth, as well as the interconnections between memory, imagery and identity.
Memories of the past are dictated by the present.
