Memories For The Future

Memories For The Future is a wall-mounted photographic and sculptural installation emerging from my archive of affective family snapshots from the 1990s and 2000s. Everyday textiles, bodily substances, and shadows are abstracted from these fragmented photographs to form accompanying wooden cut-outs. This doubling adheres to the more classic Freudian notion of the uncanny, being a thing or event encountered in a psychologically unsettling context. The unsettling childhood narratives display private desires, passionate behaviours and domestic situations, first as photographic spectacles, and more recently as aesthetic objects in a gallery setting. The absurd child recognizes how objects, places, and thoughts become invested with both happiness and unhappiness. The project thus rejects good cheer and common sense to delight in the abject nature of point-and-shoot photography, reflecting another side of photography, in relation to today’s performative selfie culture.