Memory Collective VII
The Memory Collective is the recreation of a project I found on the internet one lazy afternoon at my office. The mission of the Memory Collective is to explore the nature of memory, specifically the act and art of remembering: how we do (and don't) put back together those fragments and shards, those fleeting images and lasting impressions, that reside in our memories. At the start of our project, participants each submit a memory fragment. Each fragment was then passed on to another participant to interpret through the lens of their own memory. Our memories are published as a series in this newsletter. I encourage you to notice what these memories bring up for you: images, emotions, stories, regrets, earworms. What exists on the periphery of our memory? If you missed them, here are the first , second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth installments.
Evelyn Klotz remembers Sarabeth Domal’s memory:
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"190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too." I'm reminded of required source reading in a college History course that I took (and did not do well in). Staying up all night because I procrastinated to the last minute, again. Organizing footnotes and annotations, faking my way through APA. Praying to pass (as I did through most of the required gen-ed subjects). Which also reminds me of when I had my first full-blown panic attack in Quantitative Statistics. Why didn't I just go to art school?
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"Some more clear and powerful than others." There are memories I've retained - most of them, actually - through the help of my oldest friends. One of them I go to with all school-age related, half memories. She fills in the gaps. "Which year of middle school did I wear that one shirt that I loved and wore way too many times?", "What season of soccer was that Eminem song on our warm-up CD?" All of these questions, seemingly mundane to an outsider, help round out a full and specific scene or event once answered. Flashes or segments, which become more clear and powerful. That's really how my memory works.
Sarabeth Domal’s memory:
190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.
191. On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. “If anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,” Goethe wrote.
193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory – that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve … I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.
195. Does an album of written thoughts perform a similar displacement, or replacement of the “original” thoughts themselves?
196. I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons.
- Maggie Nelson, Bluets (2009)
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I recently wrote a poem which accompanied some of my artwork in an online exhibition. The beginning lines of the poem are misleading, selfishly –
there is a story I tell:
a memory recommissioned, a purpose served
The remainder of the poem muddles through a justification of creative production during a pandemic with stifled emotion, purposely cryptic. It would be reasonable to think that the poem is, in fact, a telling of the implied “story”, the memory surfacing, but of course, it is not.
I’ll try and tell it to you now, but I can’t promise the truth.
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Seven years ago, I developed a technique for taking long-exposure photographs, a technique which was novel to me and to those I asked. I thought I had uncovered a new form of honest expression. I planned to use the technique to explore my recent memories, aiming to visually resurrect morsels of moments in a relationship on which I had placed importance or meaning.
And so I did. I ordered my boyfriend to walk in circles under a yellow light outside of his apartment while I clicked the shutter, in the name of Undergraduate Art. I handed him the camera, and he photographed me pacing through the same circles, in the opposite direction. I told him these images were tests, that I needed to experiment more. I didn’t tell him that I was trying to re-enact the night when he screamed at me about the stars while we were walking home down an unlit road, culminating in an argument about religion under this very yellow light, waking the neighbors.
I continued shooting like this for months, driving him around and concealing my intentions. Eventually some of these photographs were pinned to a wall, some people came to look at them, more came for the wine and cheese. He didn’t show.
I was required to write a statement about this work, and it read as follows:
In this current series, I am using digital photography to recreate personal memories of moments with friends and significant others that I view as pivotal for my personal identity, which has been increasingly defined and altered by relationships.
My primary aim is to collect and re-enact moments within the selected memory, break them down, analyze them, and then reassemble them in different form.
The expansion and investigation into the potential of my established photographic process has led these works to become visually abstract. I am always experimenting in order to push the process so I can more accurately portray the visual nature of my memories. The layering of images represents a complex and continuously ending moment in time. This manipulation creates something soft yet confusing, but not grotesque or alarming. The relationship between the figures and their natural surroundings evokes a confusion of time and place and the contrast between dark and light moments creates a sense of mystery. What results is a palpable and paradoxical psychological experience. These prints are at once both complex and vague, rich and indecipherable, faithful and fleeting. They each create their own exclusive atmosphere and mimic the fragmented way in which I hold on to my memories: a compilation of moments, some more clear and powerful than others.
Some more clear and powerful than others.
When I spoke about the artworks publicly, I eluded briefly to the reality of the stories and memories represented in the photographs. I regurgitated anecdotes with sheepish conviction, as if the pain which simmered behind the artwork had been reconciled by assuming visual form, folded and tucked quietly into a pocket, ticked off a list. I failed to mention that these memories were invented.
He did scream at me on the way home, but that wasn’t the same night that we argued about religion. The photographs I took of him at twilight at the overlook were a neatly wrapped version of a walk I took with someone else. The other photographs, the ones with a ghostly figure reaching towards a door, were so apparently false to me at the time that I loved them like a stranger.
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I think of Maggie Nelson wanting to be empty of her memories, to efface them through the abrasive practice of writing. Not to record them or to give them a home, but to sift them away; I think of this constantly.
When I wrote recently of my “memory recommissioned, a purpose served”, I wanted to tell you that I made up the stories for those photographs, that I married various memories and experiences in order to protect my artwork from the truth. Or even yet, I wanted to sequester the truth, to cradle it and shelter it from over-exposure, oxidization. You should know that I never set out to accurately portray a single lived moment; I am a romantic. I wanted you to think I was a realist. It is important to understand that I don’t think of it as lying: these memories are my keepsake, my art isn’t a historical record.
But I didn’t, I’ve mislaid the truth and have no plans to find it.
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199. For to wish to wish to forget how much you loved someone – and then, to actually forget – can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird, who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.
- Maggie Nelson, Bluets (2009)