Culling from the historic 19th-Century photographer, Mathew Brady's photographic archive material, this photo-collage and print series fuses disparate visual elements, mysterious and vague sections of photographs - bits of frame edges, liminal landscapes, flashes of a face, a sad distant gaze - to create a cryptic collage of slivered moments in time. As posed as the sitters were for Brady's photographs, there are very real glimpses of the very real life they lived in their eyes - triumph and tragedy, sadness, a quiet stoicism in the face of great upheaval during that time in our history.

 

Beyond the obvious social and political implications, this series instead focuses on the concept of how we record and preserve history, our memories, our stories. Remembering what gives meaning to our lives, to our culture, what makes us who we are and who we become. Ultimately, it brings into focus what we choose to remember, or what we choose to forget. Worse yet, what we're forced to forget, or to falsely remember, and how we preserve these memories and histories, from the macro national level, to the micro personal level.

 

In the predominant digital age, we entrust our history, our future memories, almost entirely to invisible 1's and 0's. If that digital environment were to suddenly disappear, there wouldn't even be so much as a fragment with which to piece together some brief glimpse of ourselves. No fleeting moment caught in time. No fragment of a distant gaze. No ghostly, grainy mementos from another era. There will be no tangible record to refer to. (Nevermind the irony that this is being created, and viewed, digitally.) To borrow from the old adage, If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? - if we don't responsibly record our histories, do we even exist?  Memento mori.