Rememory

The series Rememory subverts traditional expectations of portraiture, as each person was asked to close their eyes and recall a past event of personal significance, thereby physically inverting and psychologically internalizing their gaze. To encourage each person to negotiate an imaginary mind space free of the camera’s appraising gaze, the photographs were made in complete darkness, with only a split second flash, randomly triggered, making the exposure.

The work’s title invokes historian Pierre Nora’s description of memory as malleable, and in a continuous process of metamorphosis and adaptation. Nora refers to memory not as an act of remembrance, but rather as a feature of the past shaped by the present. Engaging in the act of rememory, my subjects were asked to consciously recall moments from their pasts, while unfailingly, they remain aware of the present, wound within the conspicuous circumstances of the photography session.

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Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 2008