Appropriated Archive
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. These evolving chronicles buttressed by photographic imagery, which is imbued with subjective meaning, a marriage that cultivates historical distortion. In truth, there is no reality outside representation. Memories of the past are dictated by the present. Although no object is counted on more for its mnemonic technology, a photograph is not inhabited by memory, but rather produces it. Still, the photograph transforms the pathological into a historical archive. The complexities of this dichotomy underpin the medium's precarious relationship with veracity. 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. Through the appropriation of archival imagery, it aims to deteriorate the positivist discourse of photography’s relationship with truth and shed light on the interconnections between collective memory, myth, and imagery by focusing on universals. In its depiction of generic exchanges, family tradition, rituals - something both seductive, and deeply threatening emerges from the unsettling familiarity of the imagery. Its historic, visual and ideological cognizance reveals our collective imagination and reliance on archival imagery to solidify its account of the past.
