Thesis Proposal

Without memories, time is immaterial. Only the ideas that are locked in our brains remind us how time comes and goes. I believe in the collective conscious, that we all are the same, and that we are all equal. We all have memories that are special to us, but those memories are not unique. Just like we all have a brain, skin and bones, we all have the memory of sitting with someone we love, in a special place, at a special time. I want to explore how we experience memories, how they change over time, and how collectively, our memories all become essentially the same. Memory is seriously dictated by perception- perception that is incredibly different for everyone. Even at different ages, our perception changes when the world around us changes. 

This semester, the work I have been doing has grown and changed. What started as a separate project became the process for which my thesis work is being done. I started using historical photos and layering them in Photoshop to make them nightmarish. My work has now grown into a critical process that I must follow: I find images (which are now all of my own family photos- no longer anonymous historical photos), scan them into digital copies using a high quality scanner, then layer them in Photoshop to create a distorted effect, must like our memories become distorted over time. I have also tried to collage the images digitally, but the result was unprofessional and not what I wanted for my images. A few artists that I have looked at use a technique very similar to mine by layering photos many times, to the point that they are unrecognizable. My desired effect is for part of each layer to be discernible, and not completely hidden. The reason I want bits and pieces still visible is because I can pick through my brain and remember going out to dinner for my tenth birthday, opening the gifts that I received, pulling the sweater out of the package, and holding it up to myself. I cannot remember who was sitting in what seat, what the wrapping paper looked like, or how long my mother’s hair was.

How does a photograph affect memory? I have seen so many family photos from that birthday part that I am unable to discern which memories are real and which are fabricated from a photograph. Voices are not captured in photographs, so I know that my memory of my late great-grandmother’s voice is a real memory. The smell that lingered on her after she came home from the nursing home for a holiday is captured in my mind- not a photograph. However, the feel of the sweater that she always wanted me to wear may be fabricated because I have felt that fabric many times since she died. Because of these things, my memory of her is affected, perhaps even altered, to a point that I could not identify what was a real occurrence and what was conceived in my own mind.

Memories are important to all of us. My family has been struck hard by dementia and Alzheimer's. As we are young, our memories are as strong as our body, unfaltering in our own mind. As we age, memory is often the first thing to go. We become forgetful about where our car keys are, or never remember to take the grocery list when we go out shopping. In our last few years, for some people, memory is all we have left. Our body strength is gone, so we are often left to sit in a chair and remember our past many years. For less fortunate others, there is no memory, and if there is, it could not possibly be 'accurate' according to what happened forty, fifty, or sixty years ago. Time changes everything. Although details like the name of the elementary school one attended can be recalled, the look of the hallway may be remembered differently. If I went back to the school I attended in the first grade, seeing it would change my memory. Fifteen years later, I am much taller and am physically seeing the school differently. This new memory would somehow mesh into the old one to create a new hybrid memory- replacing the other with altered versions of themselves.

After this semester, I am going to continue working with this idea for the rest of the year. I want to continue using my own family photos to express how memory can be deluded and jumbled. I have thought about physically layering the images and sort of collaging them, but right now I will continue doing them digitally. I have found a paper that I really enjoy working with that reminds me of the flat hard-backed photos of old. Eventually, I will plan to frame the images I present, but I have yet to decide if they will be color or black and white.