I created this series
of little collages
for the 4th Annual 50/50 Show at
Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, CA,
and they are the most personal, and
in many ways the most rewarding,
work I've done to date.
The series deals with
layers
of memory and layers
of history,
which are not at all the same thing. Stories, or parts of stories, are lost,
and other parts are altered over
time; missing parts are replaced
with plausible inventions, and those parts that do remain are inevitably colored
by the person recalling
the stories. I think of memory as
being transparent, overlaid on
earlier memories that retain their
own reality even when contradicted
by new information.
The images here are taken from albums and unsorted photographs
and tintypes from
my mother's
family. I've scanned them and printed some on paper and others on digital
transparency film, and then layered them into hands-on collages, (as opposed
to digital collages). Many images are repeated in different iterations in
several works, just as people and events are recalled differently by different
members
of the same family.
