STATEMENT

 

Six years after my father died, I sent my childhood home videos to a lab in Tennessee to be digitized. When I got my files back, they included two hours of nearly unrecognizable footage of my father’s childhood in the early ‘60s, taken from an unlabeled tape that had gotten mixed in with the others. The video is jarring to watch – it’s glitchy and too fast and most of it appears simply as neon static until slowed to a tenth of the speed at which point faces and figures begin to emerge.

 

The attempt to find moments of legibility through the sorting and layering of both still and moving images parallels the intimacy, frustration, and necessity of archival salvage. Engaging various processes of preservation and deterioration, this work considers the ways that objects and images accumulate and retain meaning through loss and across distance. 

 

Alongside these works, I printed cyanotypes using both my own film negatives and archival family negatives in various states of decomposition. This photographic process is often difficult to control, particularly when using natural sunlight as the means of exposure and thus resulted in an excess of prints. Engaging this lack of control and continuing to repurpose and reconstruct the family archive, the screen onto which Home Movie is projected is made up of discarded cyanotypes pulped into handmade paper and stitched together.