A site specific collaborative installation with Carly Heathcote and Jami Shimon
As people experience movement from one place to another, or from one time to another, the memories we have become further distanced in the mind. It is as if dust settles upon these memories, and they become more frail in their ability to be altered by a current audience. While we re-tell stories of our own histories, the reactions and newly surfacing information from outside persons, has the power to alter and even tarnish memories.
When sunlight peers through the windows, the dust in a room is illuminated during its flight. This vision is so ephemeral in nature and holds a wistfulness similar to one’s memories. Our movements are what kick up the dust to fly about in a space, just as one’s response to a memory has the power to change the light we see it in ourselves.
These gaps in knowledge about the past fog the affectionate quality of nostalgia with the uneasy feeling of oblivion. Both oblivion in the sense that we can be unaware of our own pasts that we feel we know, but also that we worry of forgetting memories. The dust that suspends in the air is beautiful in its appearance but clouds the space it inhabits, just as our memories grow cloudier with age, as if the light we shine on them in retrospect illuminates hardly anything but dust, and our attempts to preserve nostalgic moments become a slipping into oblivion of our own histories.
As people experience movement from one place to another, or from one time to another, the memories we have become further distanced in the mind. It is as if dust settles upon these memories, and they become more frail in their ability to be altered by a current audience. While we re-tell stories of our own histories, the reactions and newly surfacing information from outside persons, has the power to alter and even tarnish memories.
When sunlight peers through the windows, the dust in a room is illuminated during its flight. This vision is so ephemeral in nature and holds a wistfulness similar to one’s memories. Our movements are what kick up the dust to fly about in a space, just as one’s response to a memory has the power to change the light we see it in ourselves.
These gaps in knowledge about the past fog the affectionate quality of nostalgia with the uneasy feeling of oblivion. Both oblivion in the sense that we can be unaware of our own pasts that we feel we know, but also that we worry of forgetting memories. The dust that suspends in the air is beautiful in its appearance but clouds the space it inhabits, just as our memories grow cloudier with age, as if the light we shine on them in retrospect illuminates hardly anything but dust, and our attempts to preserve nostalgic moments become a slipping into oblivion of our own histories.
