Constructed Memories
Image after image smoothly glide upwards, three to eight seconds per view on polished glass. At times the communication is cryptic or urgent. A truncated picture book of life experiences told in brief moments from people I mostly do not know.
Our late modernist inner cities echo similar shorthand sentiments as I travel from here to there. Brief moments of shape colour and form that register from the corner of my eye as I rush to another destination. They are so fleeting, no sooner registered as they are forgotten. My attention span is short and a split second in my mind disregards them as I move on.
Life is faster now; less patient. There’s no need to spell things out as we once did. A new language of mutual understanding has evolved that speaks in a truncated way like visual and sensory soundbites. Trying to remember those missed moments I backtrack them in my mind. The things I overlooked. Was it the corner of a building? A reflection? A surface? How can I document in camera such a brief past moment that is only partially remembered? I can only interpret. Reflecting back, in that same soundbite language that is constantly fed to me.
I construct these moments literally, — rebuilding a memory in my mind before the camera. Fragments of the overlooked that become abstract recollections. The process is cathartic, influencing me to slow down and consider what I had missed. To study what I remembered, or as American art critic Jules Langsner describes in his essay Four Abstract Classicist’s
‘To look in order to see’.
