'artist statement'

lost and found

when we remember, we unknowingly alter the memory. my art practice is about the (unintentional) manipulation of memory as it is repeated-- the malleability of the act of remembering. my practice is based in found photographs-- images of moments that at one point were important enough to capture on film, that somehow were misplaced, and made their way to me. with each photograph I create a vehicle for memory through time-- bergson calls this the 'duration' (of memory) between the present (which is actual and real) and the past (which is virtual and real.) I call on these images to enact several points in time: the time it was made, the time it was lost, the time it was found, the time it was repurposed, and the time it is seen (by others.)


every time a memory is remembered, it travels further and further away from the time in which it happened. each time we remember, the memory is subject to malleability due to changed emotions and perceptions of the rememberer at the time of the remembrance.




we ought to forget everything all at once, for every time a memory is remembered it is reremembered or misremembered or disremembered until we don't know if we are thinking of the experience or the rememory or the mismemory or the unmemory.

Selection from 'The Human Stain'

Her head of hair was something, a labyrinthine, billowing wreath of spirals and ringlets, fuzzy as twine and large enough for use as Christmas ornamentation. All the disquiet of her childhood seemed to have passed into the convolutions of her sinuous thicket of hair. Her irreversible hair. You could polish pots with it and no more alter its construction than if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral and shrub, perhaps possessing medicinal properties.


--Philip Roth

Pierre Nora, on the fundamental opposition of History & Memory:

Memory always fluctuates between remembering & forgetting. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic & incomplete, of what is no longer.

Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.

Memory, insofar as it is affective & magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic -- responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual & secular production, calls for analysis & criticism.

Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again.

Memory is blind to all but the group it binds -- which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple & yet specific; collective, plural, & yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone & to no one, whence it's claim to universal authority

Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, & objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions & to relations between things.

Memory is absolute, while history an only conceive the relative.


(1989)

Photo conglomeration

What is revealed in concealment? What is concealed in revealing? What do you see when you look? What don't you see when you look?