Description
In the digital age how does found imagery from the past composed of familiar yet unresolved photographs and the physicalities they represent serve as mnemonic devices able to trigger emotions and deeply concealed memories? Using Derrida’s notion of the “arkhe” this series examines internal and external memory and to what extent existing archives of experience can be interrogated and adapt to newly discovered evidence that retraces our origins, forcing new space to be made to accommodate previously forgotten or suppressed vestiges that can inform our present. Using Bergson’s thoughts on perception and memory and a ‘plurality of moments’ it also questions the veracity of existing memory and beliefs in the face of new knowledge and our ability to reconfigure our identity and reconsider supposed concrete relationships with the past. At the moment we view them, these images exist simultaneous as both new and old, they both reaffirm and shatter existing ways of knowing, forcing us to confront the mneme and anamnesis developed over a lifetime and entering, momentarily, ‘pure perception’.
On the cusp of my parent’s finalization of their divorce after 40 years of marriage I returned to my family home, possibly for the last time, to examine numerous boxes of possessions which I had collected since adolescence and determine what, if anything, I could or would preserve and add to my post-adolescent archives. Among all the objects from the past, letters, toys, souvenirs, coasters, comic and sports cards collections, a box of over 50 rolls of undeveloped film (110, 126, 135,disc etc.) became my personal archaeological discovery.
This project that began in August 2019 with the discovery of 55 undeveloped rolls of 35mm, 110, 126, DISC, and Advantix film formats. I have now developed all of the rolls of film with the exception of the Koda-Chrome 64, which I’ve been told labs no longer process. I have invited my immediate family to view and comment on 75 images selected from the hundreds developed so far. The comments received will be juxtaposed alongside each of the image descriptions selected for exhibit. The images represent re-visitations of our collective pasts as we attempt to renegotiate and recreate our memories, challenging our current understanding of perception, identity, family, and memory.
