http://ekphrasis.info/annmilligan
AddDress
A dog-eared personal address book has instigated this investigation into
my own memory.
I decided to contact people from my ‘forgotten’ past despite a strong
aversion to stirring up an uncomfortably, relevant or irrelevant nostalgia.
I’ve compulsively kept these names and addresses for thirty years, or so. Why? Am I expecting some sort of elucidation?
I’m interested in
the discordance of memory that creates a distrust, or a betrayal in the
everyday experience. This ‘hard cover’ book is now outdated and has been virtually
shape-shifted by a technology that will become just as obsolete, in the future
past. We are a culture obsessed with the idea of remembering everything and
dually fearful of not remembering anything at all. How do memories create our identity and what happens when
that identity starts to disintegrate? If we lose our memory will someone else be able to piece together our
lives from what we have recorded, collected? Can we revisit a past that may
never have happened and remember what can’t be remembered? Who will really
care? Does
a disturbance in the present that is delegated from the past not come with its
own set of responsibilities and consequences? Ones that can possibly even affect the future?
It is these relationships
that are starting to be forgotten that intrigue me. I see these spaces of
memory lapses as new entryways for alternative interpretations and
investigations through attempting a reconstruction of the past through a present
that has already become disassociated.
sound, installation
March 26 -
April 6, 2013
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