Scraps of Mind
I was inspired by the photography exhibit "FÉMINITUDE", A PATH TOWARDS FEMININITY by Isabelle Perreau for this month's Late Nite Pie project.
I wanted to explore memory and story through imagery. However, whereas Isabelle's work is personal and meaningful I wanted to focus on the impersonal and transitory short-term memory of society.
I began by collecting current periodicals so that I would be able to create something that was tied to this current time. I tried to collect periodicals from a wide variety of topics. I also asked for other people to help me select the periodicals to reduce my curatorial impact. It was my goal to reduce my impact on the selection of content as this would inevitably lead to other themes rising up. I wanted to see what would occur if I had random people select the content to fill the piece. I laid the periodicals out on a table in front of the canvas and asked people who came to Late Nite Pie to browse through until they found something that caught their eye. They were then instructed to tear it out and paste it to the canvas.
I noticed right away that even though there was no instruction as to how to place the content on the canvas, it was difficult for people to place the images or text in a way which was not inline with the direction of other images and text on the canvas. There is an deep drive to create order and connection even in a situation were there is no reason to expect any order or connection between the separate pieces.
I began to think how we might take these random bits of information and place them within the organized and connected parts of our memory. How much "junk" information is tied into our memory?
