Memory Believes (2001)

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
-William Faulkner

As with earlier projects, my preoccupations lie in the overlapping areas of memory, representation, photography and cinema; the precarious space between memory and knowledge. Particularly fascinating to me are the lingering images of public spectacles etched into my own childhood memories. The uncanny images that make up Memory Believes, drawn from black and white super 8 film, evoke a singular nostalgia for the nostalgic, both familiar and strange, and instantly conjure up visions of home movies, old films and newsreels; in short, image-based memories.

Details dissolve into the extreme graininess of the images like the decomposition of memories; like the very act of forgetting. Tiny imperfections on the super 8 film itself which, during projection, flick by in the wink of an eye, are preserved in the prints like the flawed recollection of delicate, moldering memory. The lack of visual information and the filmic/dramatic presentation invite the viewer to complete the image and place it in an imaginary mnemonic context; in a narrative of his or her own construction. The image, unanchored in time, drifts effortlessly into one’s memories, mingling with actual past experiences and, by a process of unconscious osmosis, substitutes ‘real’ memory with a constructed image. As Dali once noted: “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”

The artist would like to thank Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their support of this project.

Solo shows:

2012 Memory Believes & MOVIE/MUSIC, Occurrence – Espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal

2006 Carte Blanche, Magenta Foundation, Toronto, p. 110.

The project consists of twenty-seven silver gelatin prints, four of which measure 170 x 117.5 cm / 67 x 46¼ inches each and are framed without mats in austere black wood frames, while the remaining twenty-three prints measure 61 x 51 cm / 24 x 20 inches each and are matted (image size is 56 x 43 cm / 22 x 17 inches) and framed in 79.5 x 67 cm / 31¼ x 26¼ inch austere black wood frames. All four large prints and anywhere between ten and twenty-three of the smaller prints should be shown. Currently, all four of the large prints are framed ten of the smaller prints are framed.

Please contact the artist.