Panoramavision
To achieve my B.F.A. in Studio Art at Virginia Tech, I created a thesis project that follows the collected snapshots of Ruth, Gil, Bonnie, and Barbara Adams, a family from Louisville, KY. While on internship in Indiana three years ago, I discovered a trunk of Kodak Kodachrome slides recording select moments of their lives from 1947-1967. After viewing, documenting, and cataloguing the 694 slides, I set out to revive their reality based on the information provided, build awareness of their existence, and fabricate my own version.
In these works, I explored what happens to memory when a person dies, disappears, or the evidence of their existence is discarded. Since their true identities remain a mystery, I constructed personality and context to reinvent memory based on assumptions relative to my own subjective experience. Like an investigator analyzing visual cues, faces, and surroundings to piece together a panoramic narrative, I navigate the boundaries of absence to interpret identity and family engagement.
While removed from those who remember, interpreting a trunk of slides calls attention to the instability of memory and the impossibility of documenting a life beneath its surface. In these works, I attempt to revive something lost rather than discard, even if the details are altered in translation.
