invitation to lost time

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Invitation to Lost Time is a series of large photographic works on aluminum that reflects upon the fallibility of human memory and the loss of history. This series began with the discovery of a box of photographs that once belonged to family members two and three generations ago. Depicting figures within mundane domestic and outdoor spaces, these photographs mark moments in time to which personal connection has been lost. As a response to recognizing many of the spaces but not the people within them, I redact the figure from each of the original photographs by folding the section containing them out of view while allowing uncanny hints––shadows, clothing, hair, etc.––to remain. Each of the photographs is digitally scanned, scaled up to refer back to the figure, printed onto aluminum sheets and floated in frames to amplify the presence of the photographic object.
Disrupting the visual field, the crease from the folding gesture shifts the subject of each image from the figure to the background. These shifts expose subtle clues held within the images––ranging from furniture, books, and picture frames to scenes from gardens, parks, and recreational areas––that point to the lost identities of the people once inhabiting these spaces. These representational references merge with abstract components, such as colorful scanning artifacts, folds, cracks, and tears, to create new unified images that speak to my process in the studio. The resulting works oscillate between acting as monumental windows into dislocated spaces and functioning as surfaces asserting themselves as degraded paper and plastic composites. This synthesis of representational references and abstract elements enables me to question how objects and images continually build and shed meaning in our current screen-based culture. As a series, Invitation to Lost Time, functions as an archival index of manipulated memory objects that connects history with the present, blurs the border between personal and collective memory and emphasizes the inevitable loss of objects as vehicles for storytelling.