I Don't Remember: Can You Show Me?

I am convinced, more than ever as I move through my youth, that what I consider a memory is really a composite: a complex confluence of oral narratives, synaptic pathways, photographs, scents, embodied experience. It is rare to have what I have come to consider a true, or unaided, memory: an imprint; a dream-like sequence of images flickering on inner screens; voice, sound, movement, sensation tumbling together just behind or beyond the present. I would say I possess a handful of Memories, and thousands upon thousands of semi-remembrances that have become Constructed Memories.

These are the stories we are told about ourselves by family and old friends, the videos we see of ourselves taken my early adopter aunts and uncles, and the photo albums, vinyl or cyber, that chronicle our lives, more or less consistently and to which we have been subjected or had access over many years.

I am interested in exploring this nexus of sensory stimuli in so far as our selves are concerned. The individual construction of identity is undeniably a social process; the combination of the social acting upon us while we, through our own memetic tunnels and tunes, act upon ourselves. The melodies will be different, so too the colour and light of each re-constituted, re-membered, moment.

The design of our lives must be impacted not only by the design, uncontrolled and uncontrollable in many instances as it likely was, of our pasts, but also by how we filter, reconstitute and carry it.

Whether we put them in small leather pouches and carry it around our necks like water for a long trek, place them behind glass paned cabinetry to be dusted off at arm's length when protocol demands, or whether we keep them in the closet like our grandmother's sweaters and our grandfather's hats, influences how we see ourselves, the world around us, and is influenced by this notion of The Past, our Personal History.

Oral narrative, combined with sensory memory, provides the basis for a new photographic exploration of the objects, sensations and stories that make us believe we remember who we are when, in fact, without them, we may have forgotten. Or we may have decided to be something else, somebody else, entirely.