Without memories, time is immaterial.
Only the ideas that are locked in our brains reminds us of 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 quite 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.
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.
These ideas have consumed me. I have
become obsessed with finding ways that history has repeated itself. I find
photos of my grandmother and grandfather from sixty years ago that are
identical to the ones I have of my fiancé and myself. Are these memories
identical, hugging in a yard in front of a camera? Do we share these memories
or do they simply belong to ourselves? To express these thoughts I layer my own
family photographs: photographs that show my own memories, in a way that a
viewer can connect and recall their own family memories. By both the artist and
the viewer remembering, we share a connection. We share a memory.
Rebecca Bickers
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