Kaye Goldman Clarke: Last Seen…
Artist(s):
Title:
- Last Seen...
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2003
Category:
Keywords:
Artist Statement:
In Last Seen… I set out to document a period of my life for which no record exists. Although the work utilizes my personal history, it is not about nostalgia or an effort to retrieve memories. Rather, it explores the elusive nature of memory itself.
The portraits are composites, created with the computer program, Faces, developed for forensic sketch artists. They were pieced together feature by feature, much as are the faces of criminal suspects from eyewitness accounts. The faithfulness of each portrait to its subject varies according to the limits of the program, the clarity of each particular memory, and the creative, often uncanny, ability of memory itself to play with “truth.”
The photographs are the result of my recent revisitation of sites associated with the people depicted in the portraits: homes where we lived, or places we frequented. Again, due to changes in the physical landscape over time or the haziness of memory, some photos are visually “truer” than others: I found some buildings essentially unchanged, while some photographs use stand-ins in order to more accurately reflect my remembered “reality.” In others, I substituted what currently stands on the spot, although it might bear only a slight resemblance to its counterpart in the past.
Thus, Last Seen… forays into territory where the present and the past impinge on one another, creating a curious mixture of the factual and fictive, the real and surreal, the realm of the memory.
