Photos (To Go) is a special product developed for Shadow Shop at SFMOMA 2012. Each package contains a set of silver gelatin prints on a theme. Collect them all!
“A temporary and alternative store/distribution point embedded within the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s fifth floor galleries, Shadowshop will stock hundreds of artists’ multiples, small works, tchotchkes, catalogs, books, zines, media works, and other distributive creative output.”
All memories and all photographs are works of fiction, whose meanings are intertwined with elements of truth. Interpretations of both are transient, constantly incorporating new ideas and experiences. In light of that philosophy, I regard my photographs as autobiographical fictions. They hold true evidence of the world, while distorting the past and suggesting something else. The images provide metaphoric cues about my own history and, in less concrete ways, they are amalgamations of memories, fantasies and actual experience. I have named this body of work after the memory disorder that produces a similar commingling of fact and fiction: paramnesia.
The subject of memory has always dominated my work. In recent years, this has taken the form of explorations of process and the suggestive nature of photographs. I am forever fascinated by the power of photographic images over memories, even their power to distort our memories. This newest work follows the same train of thought, seeking to reconstruct and construct the past through photographic suggestion. I’ve based these images on photographs, stories and longings culled from my own family and inner anxieties. Anything that makes a shadow can form an image in the darkroom, and I create my negatives using multiple layers of collage, pencil drawings, and photographs printed on typing paper. I titled these “photogenic drawings” after the early inventor Talbot’s description of his first experiments using the shadows of objects to make images.