Artist Statement for

Memory Project

Memory is the brain's tool to capture, recall, and recognize previous experiences. As a mental storage facility of remembrances, its contents have the ability to shape our present and future actions, spurring us into nostalgic reverie or simply maintaining harvested information. Likewise, it is forever fluctuating, imperfect, and vulnerable to permutation and outright distortion. My own memory changes as much as it recollects, mingling perceived facts with accidental fictions. It is not linear, but rather combines vague images to recreate an idea of what has occurred. There is a clear filtering and interpretation of the accumulated past. I have often recounted stories of what I believed I remembered, only to have my version of events fall under dispute over the exact particulars.

Photography, on the other hand, could be seen as meticulously achieving what memory should. Its accurate rendering of details and colors is in direct opposition to memory's hazy, fabricated portrayal of what has transpired. In a way, photography is to memory as reality is to perception. It is of little surprise that the medium had been instilled with such trust in its veracity for so long. Photographs, however, can be easily manipulated or induced to show subjective depictions. What happens when the mechanized lens stands in for the human eye?

These topics are what motivate my current body of work. My strategy is to permit the camera to stand in for, or become, my visual memory, with all the faults, misperceptions, and fragments merged together. By utilizing erratic or malfunctioning cameras, I relinquish control of knowing what the final image will be, much like how unpredictable the act of remembering is. They mimic my brain's ability to create recollections by blending separate pieces of a moment into one photograph. Each device interprets and translates rather than merely illustrates. Photography is said to record the death of an instant in time, but here, I allow the camera to imbue life into the formation of these pictures. While I may choose when to press the shutter, it chooses what to remember. Together, we reconstruct what we, in our own idiosyncratic ways, saw happen. I become the methodical eyewitness who decides where to point the lens, and it becomes a flawed, human storyteller with its elusively formed imagery.