Artist statement

When a photograph is taken, a voice is recorded, or a video is captured, there is a duplication that occurs. One memory is stored internally in the body to be reconstituted later while the other takes a physical form and enters into the archive of memory objects. It is the relationship between the two forms—one living and malleable, the other rigid and enduring—that my work takes as its subject.

The space that exists between these two forms is charged by the politics of identity, the clash of past and present, and the slippage between invention and record. In aggregating personal and institutional memory object archives we have constructed shared narratives of self, family, and community that are marked by a frozen, excerpted sense of completeness. Biological memories, however, as suggested by recent studies in memory science, are far more incomplete and mercurial—subject to revision each time we revisit them. In my work I bring memory objects into the digital environment as a way to introduce aberrations and imperfections that complicate and interrogate the construction of these narratives.