Link to Digital Space
My great grandmother had dementia.
I wanted to meet her, but the timing never worked out. My father would always tell me how she could no longer remember he was her son, or that I even existed. I was terrified. Though I know it is not true, I feel as if I have my fist closed tightly around all that makes me ME, and if I were to let go, it would all blow away.
This work is an expression of that fear translated into photographic form, for it is fear that drives me. I cannot help but think of a day where all I know may be washed away like tears in rain.
This project originated as recreations of photographs from the memories of friends abstracted through a game of telephone. With time, I realized that there could be no other subjects than me. This is a collection of scenes, my scenes, of moments in my life both important and pedestrian. All remembered wrongly. When the photo was taken, where, who was there and why. From there, recreated incorrectly. The figures are hollow, their expressions incorrect, posing, placement, environment all slightly off. I am the only person present, while simultaneously playing all the parts, for it is my remembrance, my abstraction.
As time has passed, this work has progressed into the digital, a three dimensional constructed reality, empty of all else save for the memories. Broken figures like broken records, playing out their parts over and over and over again, decomposing, decaying, abstracting.
This is my way of clinging to the past. Etching these parts of myself into my mind with the light on the camera’s sensor. I also accept the abstraction; by recreating them incorrectly, I accept the fragility of memory, the ephemerality of self.