Abstract
Remains to be Seen, a multi-media installation, provides the opportunity for reconfiguration, re-contextualization and re-remembering of visual memory. Geoffry Cubit, a historian of memory, has noted that “memory has no fixed, stable, unitary meaning to which we can invariably recur: it has always been, and legitimately, a concept in flux and under review”.[1]My work in this exhibition (and as discussed throughout this paper) addresses the unstable and revisionist nature of memory—both culturally and individually. Additionally, I attempt to address how memory (collective, visual, familial and individual) is implicated in the creation of selfhood, of personal narrative, and of family myth. In this exhibition, I marry traditional print and paper-making techniques with contemporary digital technologies to explore the ways in which memory is created and re-created by and across individuals, families, and social-historical contexts. I use family video footage from 1950’s Kentucky to utilize the nostalgia for another time, confronting and exposing problematic familial and cultural ideology and narratives. While images from the past may evoke sentimentality, the use of moving images over still digital print allows viewers to reflect on narrative interplay among static and mobile images in order to confront, expose and rework this tendency. Rather than portraying a static narrative of the past, I use the moving image to decontextualize the vernacular of the print. The images then function as a catalyst for and invitation to dialogue between the past and the present.
[1]Geoffry Cubit, History and Memory, (NYC: Manchester University Press, 2007), 7.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:masters_theses_2-1720 |
| Date | 25 October 2018 |
| Creators | Kooperkamp, Nathanael |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Masters Theses |
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