Nostalgic Memories of Home and Nation

Thinking about Julia Hirsch's Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect, she sees the family photograph as a democratization. Analyzing the history of family photography, especially Renaissance portraiture and going to the evolution of family portraiture to what we now know as snapshots originating from Kodak. Hirsch then illustrates found and lost family photographs.
Since my work is particularly from found photographs of domestic living I have been interested in both the snapshot and the space that is inhabited in these domestic settings. I've been looking at Patrick Wright's On Living in an Old Country:The National Past in Contemporary Britain, though I am primarily looking at the U.S. his ideas made it a good read. Wright is looking at how history can residue in societies contemporary everyday life, which then reflects people's certain identity and life. The rich introduction to such ideas on nostalgia and everyday life specifically related to Britain. A nations history relating to the family memories and its core identity. I've been thinking and relating these thoughts to the U.S.'s family structure and cultural idealism. If fusing one's own family history/ family memories and stories with the collective memory of the historical consciousness of the nation will those memories conflict or conjoin with one another. The concept of nationhood seems to be active as the same concepts of family idealism and the standards of a family culture. The remembering shared by families along with nationhoods memory are closely related and influence one another, even by just thinking of words such as "homeland" and "motherland", the memory of home and nation do get mixed together. Also looked at Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, by Benedict Anderson on these thoughts.

New Work

Hybrids of old and contemporary domestic photographs investigating family and cultural ideals of American living. Creating fictional hybrids I am questioning personal and collective memories linking with idealism of suburbia and family.

36x36 acrylic on canvas

66x47 acrylic on canvas

66x47 acrylic on canvas

66x47 acrylic on canvas

Autobiographical Memories

East German artist Wiebke Loeper's piece MOLL 31 (1995), she recalls her family living in Plattenbaus, buildings of the former GDR. She juxtaposed family photos taken by her father in the 1970s with her own photographs of the same places in present day. Loeper growing up in a country that no longer exists and the places and scenes of her childhood dissapeared, questions if the ideals and values of that time have disapeared also.
 Loeper's work begins to question how far and removed can things reproduce a new memory?


wiebkeloeper.de

Lehrer, How Friends Ruin Memory:The Social Conformity Affect

Interesting article about the fiction of memories by Jonah Lehrer




http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/how-friends-ruin-memory-the-social-conformity-effect/

New Work

Acrylic on Canvas 66x47

Acrylic on Canvas 66x47

Acrylic on Canvas 36x36

Acrylic on Canvas 40x30

Suburban home life : tracking the American Dream

Whitney Museum 1989 Show Suburban Home Life: Tracking the American Dream

A list of artists in exhibition all examining different aspects of suburbia.
I found Eric Fischl's work most intriguing with psychological aspects that come within the nuclear family unit of suburbia.
Diane Arbus
Dan Graham
Jeff Koons
Bill Owens
Laurie Simmons

Some New Readings

By Barbara Steiner and Jun Yang

 Artists exploring the autobiography and self-representation from media, social systems, and ethical ideals on self-identity. Artists creating stories of self-representation. I especially found interesting was Boltanski's 1970s fabricated narrative work. Jun Yang's hybrids of his childhood memories of mental and media images that influenced his identity.