Portfolio Retrospective
During my undergraduate degree I began my work focused on memory. My grandmother was experiencing the early stages of dementia at this time, and there was a fear that we shared. This fear fueled my curiosity into aging and how minds can being to betray us.
My digital works explored breaking down the concept that colors enhance an individual's visual memory. From a series of experiments, researchers learned that subjects were more likely to recall the color version of an image than the same scene in black and white.
I began collecting older photos that my Grandmother had taken from my childhood; specifically of places we had traveled together. I used the dominant colors in the images to slowly distort the overall picture while editing to simulate the decay in memory as we age.
After finishing my digital pieces, I began making works on paper to explore the idea of the memory loss. I worked primarily with black, white, and transparent inks to simulate the blank spaces that begin to perforate ideas or concepts that might have once been very understandable, or “black and white” in our minds. I found this very interesting when it came to the idea of screen printing and having to push the inks through the small weave of the screens to create the work. I used black ink to highlight the missing pieces of the shapes in my prints.
My most recent photography work focuses on the jumbling of memories which I have called my Sundowning Series, which is currently featured on my site, and I invite you to further explore my process.