Black Presents 2010
In this body of work, I have staged re-enactments of actual experiences and dreams from my life, casting friends and relatives to play other friends and relatives – not themselves. A serial narrative, each story is comprised of 3-4 images and is paired with hand-written text. This work is not intended to be memoir or autobiography. I’ve carefully selected and presented real experiences from my life as an exploration of our concepts of reality, memory and perception. The story is about telling the story.
These are memories that my mind returns to again and again. I began to imagine what they would look like as photographs, and the artist part of me wanted to know how they would relate to each other as a series. When images are placed in proximity to other images, suddenly a relationship is established that might not exist in real life and yet expresses some other truth. In the process, I began to understand how we create identity. In this choosing and arranging, we construct our sense of self.
The text is carefully crafted to encourage viewers to question the veracity of both the narrator and the stories. The stories can be experienced in any order. The viewer can start at any point and as they progress through the exhibition, they make connections and associations between the stories, mimicking the process of the mind as it constructs its own version of reality.